Top critical review
1.0 out of 5 starsAudiophile sound
Reviewed in Canada on October 13, 2022
Connecting to windows laptop became a nightmare
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My goal was to replace my old Jabra 65. I tried a bunch of different earbuds (1MORE EVO, Soundcore by Anker, HUAWEI FreeBuds) and they were just awful in terms of sound quality compared to my Jabra.
PROS:
- Comfort. When I inserted them for the first time I couldn't feel them like there are nothing in there. They have that nice idea with a stability band so you kind of screw the earbud inside your ear which let you adjust the degree of sealing.
- Sound quality is fantastic: they really can be called audiophiles. The bass is amazing (dnb, rap), the scene is explicit, and the most important thing is that the sound does not tire the ears.
- Noise cancelation ANC is fantastic. It's like you are underwater. I don't care much about ANC but it's nice to have it. In my case, the transparency mode is more important since I use them when riding a bicycle.
- Sweatproof and stability in the ear make them perfect for the gym.
- Battery life is tolerable for long evenings, probably around 7 hours non-stop. Charging is quite fast.
CONS:
- Price is kind of high almost 500$ with taxes.
- Case looks fragile (plastic), it's heavy, and the lid is flimsy. Can imagine what will happen if it falls on the asphalt, likely the lid will break off the body.
- No app for windows, everything is geared toward smartphones (but it works fine with my laptop on win)
- It doesn't support multiple sources like Jabra. So if it's connected to your laptop and you got the call on the smartphone, you would need to reconnect it to the smartphone manually. (When you take them out of the case they connect to the last source and if it's not available then to which is available right now.)
- Would be nice to have a paper manual in the package. I had to search for it on the internet to learn what all those status lights mean and how the touch control works and how to connect them to other devices.
- Not sure about touch control whether it's pros or cons. It's definitely better than buttons like in Jabra (quite uncomfortable to push buttons toward your ear, might be even painful). But it responds with a delay and precision is mediocre.
UPDATED:
- They can NOT work separately. The right bud passes sound to the left bud. For 2023 it's a shame
- Bluetooth connection on the street sometimes becomes glitchy and sound periodically disappears or sound on buds become out of sync
- Buggy bluetooth connection: sometimes the laptop show like buds are connected but they don't. To fix that you need to reset the case and reconnect again which is a time-consuming operation.
- Reconnecting between the laptop and the phone is a nightmare. For example, if you are waiting for a phone interview call, you have to reconnect buds to the phone in advance. So if you got an unexpected call, reconnecting on the fly IS UNREAL. That really sucks for 500-bucks buds compared to my old Jabra.
- Sometimes just one bud loses connection forever. You have to reset the case to fix that. Sometimes it requires 2-5 resets to fix. One time it took me around 30 minutes.
- a problem that drives me crazy: is that welcome sound when you just put buds in the ears. In the beginning, it sounded nice, some kind of bassy musical pipes, wow effect of the sound quality. But over time this sound becomes annoying and too loud. In the settings, you can't turn it off.
- Settings in the app by the way turned out to be quite poor and useless. You don't have much to tweak or change.
- Super strange bug in Twitter: when you click on a video, there is a 30% chance that buds will make a sharp and really loud noise, lose connection, and start reconnecting. Now, when I click on videos on Twitter, I close my eyes waiting for the blood to flow from my ears.