Table of contents
🤖
AI-generated summary
Multipoint — a failure
Hello Sony, where are you? In 2021 you can’t manage this on your little earbuds, when your WH-1000XM4 headphones handle it just fine? (And would you mind stopping with those product names that are impossible to say out loud 🤡.)
They pair quickly on Windows — on Mac you’ll have to go through the Bluetooth settings…
Audio quality — what a pleasure
You put the Sonys on for the sound. The AirPods are the best for hands-free calls, but the Sonys are built to transmit the emotion of music first and foremost.
That’s a real advantage if you prioritise audio quality for music, but on hands-free calls there’s an unpleasant hiss 🤮.
The case
Apple is still shoving its Lightning port on all its audio accessories and it’s getting tiresome… With the Sony, it’s USB-C — the universal port.
The case supports wireless charging, which tends to generate more heat than is ideal for battery longevity.
An LED tells you the charging state of the case, but there’s no way to know the exact percentage. No battery widget in iOS like you get for the AirPods case.
The earbuds announce their own charge level when you put them in your ears. I don’t see the point — it would make much more sense to announce the case’s charge level instead. The case charges the earbuds, so most of the time they’re at 100% when you take them out.
An unmatched app
When someone speaks to you, the earbuds can automatically switch modes — that’s very handy.
Shortcuts galore 🤩. One criticism though: you can’t configure exactly what you want. It’s like profiles — you can’t have one tap for play, two taps for volume up, three for volume down. That’s a shame.
Especially since the limitation is purely in software.
On the other hand, I was pleasantly surprised 😮 by how practical these touch controls are in everyday use. In general you can never reliably get the controls to do what you want, but Sony has nailed the sensitivity.
The failures
You clear your throat and the earbuds switch to listening mode 👂. Not ideal — but if you start singing, the earbuds drop out of noise-cancellation mode. They’re too dumb in that mode, so I disabled it.
The noise at every movement detection for adaptive sound is disorienting. When you’re walking 🚶♀️, every stop 🛑 triggers a sound. At first you wonder why. From a user experience standpoint this noise serves absolutely no purpose — I can’t understand why it’s on by default.
Wind noise: even with the dedicated wind-cancellation option 🌬, it’s not reduced as well as with the AirPods Pro. That’s a deal-breaker for runners 🏃♀️.
Still from a user experience angle, I don’t understand why this is even a toggle — the earbuds should be smart enough to switch into that mode automatically.
I noticed the right earbud drains faster than the left by around 5 to 10%, which I find surprising. It’s even odd to show the user both percentages separately — you might as well show the lower one, but display the same value for both earbuds.
Finally, even though many online reviews praise the Bluetooth connection’s rock-solid stability, on my end I’ve had a few drop-outs. The left, then the right, cut out for no reason — then reconnected a few seconds later — even with the latest firmware.
In conclusion
Very good earbuds 🎧 for music, and very — arguably too — configurable: the average user won’t touch even half the settings available in the app. Speaking of the app, the average user shouldn’t have to manually adjust the noise reduction level — the earbuds should be smart enough to do it themselves.
The lack of multipoint connectivity is a deal-breaker, and for anyone in the Apple ecosystem, they simply can’t match the AirPods Pro for overall user experience.
