I'm not sure if personal reviews of products are allowed on Technology, but here goes: My review of Jabra Evolve2 85 MS headset.

I bought this headset for work in october 2023, and it has been my main headset at work since then. I mainly use it with an Ubuntu laptop. The reason I bought MS instead of UC version was that the UC was not available, and as far as I know it shouldn't matter for my use.

What piqued my interest for the Evolve2 85 were the following things:

It has a microphone boom
The boom is retractable and is hidden when retracted, so the headset can be used in public without looking like a dork (my opinion)
Active noise cancelling tech
Connect to two devices at the same time

I work in a shared office, and my colleague and I often have separate remote video meetings at the same time, so I wanted an headset that both had a microphone boom to decrease the amount of noise from him that it picked up, and that I would not hear his voice through the headset with active noise cancelling and over ear configuration.

Result: This headset has been a huge disappointment. I thought the microphone boom would help with the headset picking up noise other than my voice, but it seems even worse than my Sony WH-1000XM3 with no microphone boom. Whenever anyone is chatting within my office, the voices are clearly picked up by the headset. I was hoping some later updates would help, but so far there has been no changes after any updates.

The ANC is ok, but not great. I can concentrate on my meetings even with noise/chatter in the background, but that's mostly to the over ear design, and not the ANC, as it is little difference when it's on or off.

The sound of the headset is quite good. I use it to listen to music at work, and I have no complaints, considering it's a business oriented headset. But, if for some reason the headset thinks I want to use the microphone, the sound deteriorates massively, and becomes very tinny. This is both if it is conncted by Bluetooth or through the Jabra usb-c receiver. This I think is normal due to bandwith issues for a wireless headset, though I had hoped the Jabra receiver could have had a solution for this. But what is annoying is that getting the sound back to normal after ending a meeting is completely random. Sometimes it reverts very fast, other times I can't find anyway to reset it other than rebooting the machine.

And often after the microphone has been active, I get a sort of knocking sound in the headset every 30 seconds or so. And this almost never go away without rebooting the maching.

These things MAY be due to running Linux no my work pc, and that it might work better with Windows. But I have not experienced these problems with any other headset. It's very annoying.

So in conclusion: I think this headset is a huge disappointment. It may work better in windows than Linux, but the quality of the microphone I think is regardless of OS, as it is the same on my phone. It picks up all noise from my surroundings, even though I use the microphone boom. The only reason I still use it at work is because I had to convince my boss to buy it for me, and I can't admit it was shit :p