Firmware Upgrades on Jabra Headsets (Evolve 20)

Good afternoon all,

Headsets used to be a simple ‘plug it and forget it’ kind of device but there are certain makes and models that can have firmware upgrades applicable to them.

Some headsets that I deal with on a daily basis are Plantronics HW520 with the Plantronics DA70 USB adapter and the Jabra Evolve 20 headsets.

I won’t get into specific details regarding the Plantronic headsets paired with the DA70 USB adapter but avoid that combination if you can. Compared to the Jabra headsets, I’ve had a ton of failures and issues with the Plantronics configuration listed above than I’ve had with Jabra.

Anyways, this isn’t a post to compare both but I just wanted to mention it. I might write a post about this in the future outlining my experience and the issues/failures I’ve seen.

This sunny and hot saturday afternoon, I decided to pop by work to get some quiet time and push through with some outstanding tasks on my plate.

One of the tasks is to prepare a large amount of Jabra Evolve 20 headsets to be deployed to our staff over the comming weeks.

Companies deploy most if not all staff to Work From Home (WFH) due to COVID in 2020/2021+ and while we prepare and send employees to work at home, we want to make sure we patch and reduce the amount of unnecessary calls to helpdesk.

Our staff primarily use Jabra Evolve 20 headsets and they are great, well priced and comfortable but we have had some compatability issues in the past with them.

Some of the issues we experienced was performance and stability of the headset and compatibility with platforms such as Genesys cloud dialers.

When we initially started to troubleshoot, we realized that Jabra Evolve and Plantronics headsets can have firmware upgrades applied to them via Jabra Direct or Plantronics Hub.

When comparing current software versions detected on the headset and new updates and their release notes, we found that often Performance and Stability Improvements are listed in each firmware upgrade along with software compatibility improvements.

When we updated the Jabra Evolve 20 headsets to the latest firmware version as of 2021 (version 4.3.1), we found that our issues were no longer valid. Voila!

95% of these headsets update without issues within the Jabra Direct application but this afternoon I ran into a few headsets that upon starting the firmware upgrade, would error out and no longer cooperate with the application, shown below.

The error above shows after I tried to apply the firmware upgrade, the same way I did it for the many previous headsets.

Pressing Recover Now / Recover just provides me that bland Firmware was not updated message, with the recommendation to contact the local IT Administrator (myself) or Jabra Support.

Since the Jabra Direct application refused to cooperate, I decided to check the Jabra Website to see if a manual firmware upgrade file exists. Low and behold, it does. Release date 2021/04/15, version 4.3.1. I download the file (Jabra_EVOLVE_20_30_4.3.1.zip) and look at the contents of the zip.

Inside is just a basic info.xml and a .hex file.

How do I execute this zip file or the contents of the zip file?

I do some searching online and find mention of an application called Jabra Firmware Upgrade wizard, but I wasn’t able to successfully locate it, nor unsure if it would actually work in my case.

I kept searching and eventually found an article on Jabras website that explains how to manually upgrade the firmware when a failed firmware installation occurs.

The important part of this is when you enter the Updates section of Jabra Direct, press the following keys to unlock the Update From File option.

CTRL + SHIFT + U

As you can see above, the same headset that failed the firmware and failed to recover the previous version, was successfully updated using the .zip file via the Update From File hidden option.

Thinking that the few headsets might have to be RMA’d, I was able to get them updated and ready for deployment.

As this was not an easy find, despite the instructions on Jabras site, I found many discussions and attempts to manually apply the firmware via alternative methods.

Coming across this Jabra article and the hidden menu, I knew I wanted to share it here in the event that somebody runs into the same issue as I have.

Thanks for reading.