These aren't bad for a freshmen engineering effort. They aren't great, but they aren't really bad either.
Music streaming is actually quite good. They are closer to wired quality than any of my other wireless headphones. The initial pairing was seamless. Thats the extent of the wins in the good column.
The lack of controls is more annoying than I thought it would be. Asking siri to adjust my volume might make for a good commercial but its completely impractical for normal use.
I was shocked by the terrible battery life. It is at best 2 hours unless you only use them for listening to music. On my first day of real use they died before my second hour of calls ended, dumping me out to speakerphone. I thought they were defective. I had bought into the PR around the 5hour battery life without noticing the footnote. Apparently 2 hours best case is all they are actually designed to do.
Call quality was OK while they lasted. No complaints in the almost 2 hours I got out of them. I did some offline recording tests, so I know they are heavily compressed and tend to artifact around hard consonants, words with s, and sound low bitrate, but so far people have been able to figure out what I'm saying. If I keep them I'll eventually get to try them under less ideal conditions.
The battery life though, wow, thats bad. No wonder they hid it in a footnote.
Music streaming is actually quite good. They are closer to wired quality than any of my other wireless headphones. The initial pairing was seamless. Thats the extent of the wins in the good column.
The lack of controls is more annoying than I thought it would be. Asking siri to adjust my volume might make for a good commercial but its completely impractical for normal use.
I was shocked by the terrible battery life. It is at best 2 hours unless you only use them for listening to music. On my first day of real use they died before my second hour of calls ended, dumping me out to speakerphone. I thought they were defective. I had bought into the PR around the 5hour battery life without noticing the footnote. Apparently 2 hours best case is all they are actually designed to do.
Call quality was OK while they lasted. No complaints in the almost 2 hours I got out of them. I did some offline recording tests, so I know they are heavily compressed and tend to artifact around hard consonants, words with s, and sound low bitrate, but so far people have been able to figure out what I'm saying. If I keep them I'll eventually get to try them under less ideal conditions.
The battery life though, wow, thats bad. No wonder they hid it in a footnote.