Jabra Sport Pulse bring elite training to the masses: should you buy them?

Jabra Sport Pulse headphones bring elite training to the masses
Semi-shadow sultriness is confirmed as optional

Jabra reckons that we're all wasting our time trotting around the park for a few minutes a week, getting tangled in a million wires, which is why its created the Sport Pulse headphones.

These launched at £200 but have slowly come down in price. These new wireless headphones can read your pulse just by sitting in the ear, which has become more popular in the months  since the Pulse launched.

Jabra Sport Pulse

Simple wireless headphones with integrated heart rate

Reasons to buy

+
Stylish look
+
Full-featured app

Reasons to avoid

-
Heart rate not great
-
Fit can be suspect at times

Rain runners

The Sport Pulse headphones are pretty standard in some respects: combined with the Sports Life app for Android or iPhone, they allow you to train in different zones and prepare plans for you based on your goal, be it speed, time or distance.

However, unlike most other running apps, the new headphones can tell you your VO2Max level (useful to see how fit you actually are getting), assess whether you're overtraining or just keep an eye on your resting heartrate over time.

We've used these pretty extensively, and while the fit is OK, the heart rate monitor leaves a lot to be desired. This is a shame, as the sheer volume of things you can do with the Jabra Sport Life app is amazing - the VO2 Max testing and Cooper tests are advanced fitness metrics.

That's not to say they won't work - other consumer reviews have lauded the heart rate technology - but these feel a bit first-gen.

Tunes a-plenty?

The wireless buds feature the usual suspects of upgrades you'd expect at this price point: Dolby-enhanced sound and resistance to sweat, for instance. 

When launched Jabra partnered with Google to let you make offline playlists from YouTube and listen to the tracks on the run, but that never really materialised into a massive selling point.

So, should you buy them? Well, for £200 they were insanely expensive at launch, given heart rate monitors and apps to monitor the sensors can be found for a lot cheaper.

But massive savings have meant they're already down to over half that, and with the holiday season coming up - with both Black Friday and the Christmas sales popping up - these could be a real smart buy for a simple set of Bluetooth running headphones, and if the heart rate monitor works for you then you'll be laughing.

Gareth Beavis
Formerly Global Editor in Chief

Gareth has been part of the consumer technology world in a career spanning three decades. He started life as a staff writer on the fledgling TechRadar, and has grown with the site (primarily as phones, tablets and wearables editor) until becoming Global Editor in Chief in 2018. Gareth has written over 4,000 articles for TechRadar, has contributed expert insight to a number of other publications, chaired panels on zeitgeist technologies, presented at the Gadget Show Live as well as representing the brand on TV and radio for multiple channels including Sky, BBC, ITV and Al-Jazeera. Passionate about fitness, he can bore anyone rigid about stress management, sleep tracking, heart rate variance as well as bemoaning something about the latest iPhone, Galaxy or OLED TV.