Review: New Headsets Let You Shoot The Breeze

— The $130 Jawbone Prime, from San Francisco-based Aliph. This company has built a reputation for making headsets with good noise cancellation. They do this by sensing vibrations in your jawbone to figure out when you're saying something.

The latest model is slimmer and has noticeably better incoming audio quality and wind suppression than the first Jawbone. But overall, the other two headsets in the test did better in the wind, and with street noise.

The user interface on the Jawbone is particularly difficult to master. For instance, you redial your last outgoing call by triple-tapping a button. Any gadget that expects me to triple-tap is overestimating my rhythmic abilities. To make it worse, this is a button that does other things if you tap it once, or if you hold it for two seconds, and it reacts differently to those actions depending on whether you're on a call or not.

— The $130 Q1 from BlueAnt Wireless Pty Ltd. of Australia. This headset looks ordinary, but hides a lot of smarts: It takes voice commands and talks to you. If you want to redial a call, you push a button and say "Redial." If you want to connect the headset to a new phone, you say "Pair me," and it walks you through the process in a patient male voice. If you can't remember the keywords, push the button and ask "What can I say?"