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"  One problem that wearable tech makers have yet to solve is how to make their creations fold seamlessly into everyday life. The sight of someone donning Google Glasses still inspires ire; it&amp;#039;s still too inconvenient to charge your smartwatch everyday. Jawbone&amp;#039;s new Era headset might be received differently, though. The tiny headset can sit in your ear all day without being intrusive and can process voice commands using both Siri on the iPhone and Google Now on Android smartphones. It&amp;#039;s as if Jawbone has brought us one step closer to Spike Jonze&amp;#039;s unsettling hi-tech future in &amp;quot;Her.&amp;quot; Some may have written headsets off as an old and outdated product category, but while it stagnated, rapid advancements were happening in another realm of technology: voice recognition. Today, it&amp;#039;s gotten so good that we can command our phones using robust controls developed by Apple and Google, but we rarely do\u2014it&amp;#039;s either too much of a hassle to dig up a phone from a pocket or purse to speak into it, or it simply feels too awkward to do so. Jawbone&amp;#039;s Era is looking to change that. When I met with company representatives yesterday afternoon for a first look at the device, they explained one of their driving principles in creating the Era: to make tech disappear, so you don&amp;#039;t have to be taken out of the moment. In terms of looks, the Era certainly is unobtrusive. The headset is 42% smaller than its predecessor and boasts the company&amp;#039;s proprietary noise cancellation technology called NoiseAssassin 4.0, first seen in its late-90s devices. The Era&amp;#039;s acoustic redesigned system appears to be pretty impressive, too. Jawbone says it can produce a full range of sounds in high-quality audio. On the top of the headset is the button that controls Era, which lets you activate your smartphone&amp;#039;s voice controls, switch back and forth between listening to music or taking a call, and otherwise keep your hands free as you go about your day. Press the main button, and you can tell the Jawbone Era things like, &amp;quot;Find a good coffee shop nearby,&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;Wake me up tomorrow at 7 am,&amp;quot; and the diminutive headset should follow your orders. All told, it&amp;#039;s quite clever of Jawbone to leverage an entire, existing system of commands on your smartphone. The Era just makes accessing it much more frictionless. After running through a few scenarios with the Jawbone reps, I thought that this piece of tech is just like Google Glass in utility, minus the obnoxious attention-grabbiness. Of course, it remains to be seen whether the Era will be that useful in real-world testing, but it&amp;#039;s definitely got potential. Battery-wise, the Jawbone Era lasts up to 10 hours of talktime and several days on standby. An optional charger for the headset gives you six more hours of juice on top of that. It links up to your devices via Bluetooth, and Jawbone is also releasing a smartphone app for the Era that lets you drill down into more granular controls. There are two versions you can choose from: A basic $100 offering for just the headset, and a slightly more expensive $129 package for the Era and its charging case. Jawbone Era comes in four colors: black, silver, brown and red. It&amp;#039;s available today from Jawbone.com and Verizon and will land in Apple, AT&amp;amp;amp;T, and Best Buy retail stores next week. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/gadgets/a10020/jawbone-releases-era-headset-16386368/>