At CES this year, audio accessory maker Jabra announced a few new consumer products. Amongst them was the Jabra Elite 65t, a premium successor to the Elite Sport earbuds, the earbuds that converted me to fully wireless audio listening.
With the Elite 65t, Jabra haven’t simply dropped their old headphones into a new case – there are a number of changes and improvements across the earbuds. Starting on the inside, the 65t boast 5 hours of playback per charge, with 2 more charges available in the micro USB charging/ carrying case. Jabra has also knocked the new earbuds up to Bluetooth 5.0, hopefully delivering a better Bluetooth audio experience into the future as more BT 5.0 phones hit the market.
Call / microphone quality can be an issue with this style of wireless earbuds, especially I find when using Google Assistant, which seems to hear some fairly random things from time to time. With the 65t Jabra has integrated additional microphones, 4 in total, across both earbuds to improve overall pickup quality as well as combat direct wind noise. With these additional microphones, I’d be very interested to see how the 65t perform with Assistant and in the wind.
Speaking of Assistant, the 65t supports voice assistants across Android and iOS via a double click on the play/pause button. Depending on your platform you’d either get Google Assistant or Siri. We’ve asked Jabra and at this stage, I don’t think the 65t will get native Google Assistant ‘Bisto’-style integration.
However, for those of you who are Alexa curious, the 65t will support ‘Alexa-on-the-go’. After installing the Alexa app it seems the Jabra Elite 65t will allow direct voice access to Alexa and its growing ecosystem. Depending on this integration, this may be a great addition to Google Assistant, or if you’re in the Alexa ecosystem a perfect set of earbuds for that platform.
The Jabra Elite 65t is now officially on sale in Australia, and along with all of the improvements the RRP hasn’t increased, it’s dropped to $299 AUD. You can grab a pair from Harvey Norman or JB HiFi.
These don’t have heart rate monitoring so they’re not really a successor to the sport elite, more their own product. I’m not sure why you’d get these when many places are selling the sport elite for less though.
These are really awesome! Call quality is excellent and audio is bright and clear. They don’t have too many other features though and the assistant feature isn’t the best.