So this is my first big review. So go easy on me.
Life 2 Positives – Battery, sound quality, ANC, design, Comfortable to wear for long periods, Solid construction and controls
Life 2 problems – Bluetooth connection
Wish I had’s - No companion app, no NFC, USB Micro b
So let’s cover the Positives first. Battery life, it takes a long time to kill these things. The 30-hour battery life is no joke. I use them for so many hours I lost count of the percent lost rate. I’ve had them for about a week and charged them once at about 20%. Something I wish I knew was when the battery notification kicks in. (I’ll be sure to test this and edit the review later.) In past experience the notification on Anker products can get difficult to handle. Sound Quality, was really nice but that’s the case for multiple Anker Sound core products. The sounds crisp and well balanced, this is good for music that fits my taste rock/punk. The ANC (Active Noise Control), let’s start with I have no experience with competitors (Bose qc and Sony MDR) in this space. I’m enjoying the ANC noticing it subtlety canceling out the back ground noise. Things like people, key board clacking and other noise are severely muffled. Loud whispers and other things can’t be heard at all and things that are usually pretty loud aren’t really canceled out at all. These are pretty much handled by the passive noise cancellation(Earmuffs). The ANC can be manually adjusted by turning it off and turning it back on this allows the headset to get a new sound sample to cancel out. I found out other more expensive headsets do this automatically and this is called adaptive filtering this is something I picked up from another review see link below. https://goo.gl/VF1sSQ. Comfort, I’ve worn these for 8 plus hours at work and I can barely notice I have them on at all. The look and materials of this head set has a more expensive feel then headset would expect. The controls have a good texture and a polite feedback when the buttons are clicked. The case supplied with the head I thought was silly at first but provides a nice bonus of protection. I am able to seal the headphones away and throw them in my back and not worry about the head set bending or braking.
Now on to the negatives, the Devices I used for testing were my Samsung Galaxy S7, Pixel XL, and Windows 10 pc. I had problems with the Bluetooth on all sorts of levels. When listening to long lengths of time sometimes the connection would stutter. The connection would repair after a few seconds. While I don’t find this that big of a deal it has to be mentioned. Two other issues are also with the Bluetooth. First issue is that I paired the head set with phone a. everything paired as it should. I then paired the headset with phone b. and the headset would crash. After a reboot everything is fine. But it is clear the headset cannot handle fast swapping of connections. The second issue is that I was on the phone with a person and I decided I wanted to switch to the headset which was not turned on. I turned on the headset and heard the familiar Bluetooth pair notification. A second later nothing, I wasn’t sure what had happened. After a few seconds I thought the headset had crashed. So I rebooted the headset and assumed everything would be fine. To my utter heart break they crashed again. Again and again. After several reboots I stopped trying because it seems that the problem is locked to when the phone is in the middle of a phone call the headset stumbled trying to pick up the call. I’m hoping that these negatives are early model bugs or unique to just the model I received.
The last thing is the wish I had’s, I wish the headset had some more advanced features. I’m not asking for better ANC or better sound. I would enjoy things like usb-c so that I could eventually only carry one charging cable. I would like to see more devices start having NFC for hot pairing. I would have like to see things like a companion app to at the very least monitor battery life and see the app used to send firmware updates.
Overall I would rank this 4 stars because all the positives far outweigh the negatives.
