In the last episode, I whined about how useless wireless earbuds are, with the main problem being that the typical range of these earbuds extends all the way from your left ear to your left shirt pocket, and not any further (when you’re outdoors and the blutooth signal doesn’t have walls to bounce off of).
But a few weeks back, I read a review for the Jabra Elite 65t, which claimed that these were the best wireless earbuds ever (when it comes to range), so I thought it was worth a go.
And it is! These are larger earbuds than I’ve been using, which probably explains the extra range. They have a little sticky-outey bits that probably has an antenna, and it seems to help: I can now semi-reliably keep my phone in my left pants pocket while having an earbud in my right ear, which was pure sci-fi with the older earbuds.
The UX on these is also quite satisfying: I pick an earbud out of the charging case, and it connects to the phone almost immediately, and then clearly tells me it’s done that. And it has a physical button that can be used to pause/unpause the audio, and switch the earbud on/off (if you don’t have the charging case with you).
If you’re just using a single earbud, that has to be the right one, but they are quite comfortable to wear, so I’ve gotten used to listening to stuff with my right ear only.
The user interface basically can’t be improved upon for my use case, which is walking around listening to radio dramas in one ear. The battery time seems to be good, too: They haven’t run out of juice once while I’ve been using them.
Which brings me to the one annoying thing, because everything has to be annoying, right?
Right.
The charging case itself is just horrible. If you open it a bit stridently, the earbuds are liable to go flying all over the place. And there are no magical magnets to keep them in place, or to guide you to inserting the earbuds back into the case, so you really have to concentrate while doing that.
Here’s an interpretative video:
Which is a shame. This is almost a perfect product, but in daily use, the bad charging pod design is an annoyance.