Friday, April 19, 2019

use your words, gadgets!

For a few year I've been partial to BeatsX headphones - honestly all wireless audio solutions lack gravitas - the Borg look of oldschool Bluetooth handsfree things, the double Uhura of Airpods - even over-the-ear big headphones look like earmuffs, or maybe Lobot from Empire Strikes Back. The "librarian eyeglass holder strap" look of BeatsX weren't so bad by comparison, and I liked how they use the same Apple W1 chip as Airpods - but you can take one out for a bit without having to hold it or put it away or have your music stop.

But I'd been through too many pairs - lost one, misplaced another, and then my main ones started losing sound on one side. (The build-quality / feel of them is great, but the durability just so-so.) So I went to Best Buy and discovered cheapish (~$30) earbuds of decent quality are now a thing! I bought a pair of Sony's WI-C300. This review agrees the sound quality is pretty decent, which is all I need - I tend to use other things for music, and have these for walking around to podcasts, and despite being a musician I'm not much of an audiophile.

Overall they aren't as comfortable as the BeatsX - the wire is a bit short, and that wire's skinniness is much less appealing than the Beats ribbon, and the buds don't have magnets (in theory useful to complete and secure the "necklace" feel when not in use, in practice it's just pleasing to have magnets to play with) but in one simple way it's much more comfortable - when you power them up, a chime plays and you hear a voice say "power on". As the things connect to your phone, another chime plays and it says "bluetooth connected".

That is SO much better than the little musical blurbles BeatsX play. There's kind of one that goes up to say "on" or something, and another to say "powering down", and maybe some chirp when it connected to the phone but I was always having to yank the control bit around to look and see if the little light on it was shining or not, because it was pretty ambiguous. (This is not helped on modern iPhones, where they don't have display area to spare to always show you if you're in headphones mode or not.)

Good old Bluetooth plus a voice explaining the status is way better than anything I thought I was getting from Apple's W1 chip plus nearly meaningless musical ditties! I think there's a simple UX takeaway here - just use words! (Ideally with an option to change languages, but I'd rather have a human language I didn't know than try to decode the musical language of Beats designers.)

(FOLLOWUP: After getting the Sony's, I also grabbed a pair of neon green iLuv Sound Air 2 - it also has simple voice feedback, but the connection wire is closer to the flat ribbon of the Beats, also a bit longer than the Sony one.)

(FOLLOWUP TO THE FOLLOWUP: having found the BeatsX I misplaced, I'm going back to them. Ultimately, the slightly greater length of their chord relative to the other ones, along with having two symmetrical battery-ish packs rather than one in the back, means they're more comfortable - especially when not in use - they will stay put as a "necklace" while the iLuvs will slip and slide off. Still, I wish there was an option to have a voice say power on/off or connected...)

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