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2017.01.10Apple AirPods

Apple AirPods

 

In it's initial announcement about the AirPods, Apple promised:

  1. AirPods would sound great,
  2. AirPods would power themselves off when taken out of the ear,
  3. AirPods could be used individually, and
  4. AirPods would recharge quickly.
This list has basically become my requirements. As someone who has ended up on conference calls lasting 12 hours, all of these features were very important to me — important enough to make them worth the wait.

I often spend very long hours at my desk. There are times when I'm on calls running demonstrations and leading debugging sessions that require me to have hands on the keyboard and a display in my face. My point is, I'm not very mobile. Most of the walking I'm doing is between my desk and another room on the same floor. I'm typically sedentary and (relatively) stationary while the AirPods are in, but I'm not necessarily looking straight ahead all of the time. I have several monitors I'm looking at.

EDIT:
It's a few days after I originally published this post. I ended up on a status call while running an errand. With the AirPods in, I did some VERY brisk walking up and down flights of stairs. I never had a problem with them falling out, or even feeling loose — and I was really moving.

Also, I'm trading up from the wired earbuds that were included with my mobile phone. In the case of the iPhone 7, these are small, white, standard issue earbuds that terminate with a lightning plug instead of a standard 1/8" stereo audio plug.

Finally, my main reason for looking for a BlueTooth solution was to get rid of the wires, which would also allow me to have my phone on a charger as needed (a new complication with the release of the iPhone 7).

My review of the AirPod is very positive.

  1. AirPods do sound terrific. They fit just like Apple's standard earbuds do, with some very minor design changes (I think the AirPod's earbud part is a little longer than the standard, wired earbuds are). They stay in the ears and don't move while I'm working. By the way, I have my music playback settings set thusly: EQ is set to "Classical", Volume Limit is off, and Sound Check is toggled off. These are the settings I've used with the wired earbuds.
  2. AirPods do power themselves off when removed from the ear. Music stops, and phone conversations are routed back to the phone.
  3. AirPods can be used individually. This is excellent for calls. It means you can "hot swap" one earpiece for the other if the battery runs out on the one you've been using.
  4. AirPods do recharge quickly. The pods fit in a case that has a lightning port on the bottom.

I have only one gripe about them: battery life. I'm seeing that a single earpiece will only run for about 1.75 hours. When it's losing power, the user gets two warnings -- an indicator of a complex series of tones when the power is low, and then then the same indicator about a second before it dies. Given that ability to swap one earpiece for another, I would recommend once you first hear that indicator, pull out the other earpiece and stick the spent one back in the case. The case has the ability to charge the earpieces with or without connection to power through that lightning port (the case is essentially a battery by itself). To check the battery status, simply flip up the lid on the case while the case is less than an inch from your phone. You'll get a pop-up that shows the battery status of each earbud and the case. Simply touch elsewhere on the screen to dismiss it.

There's really not much to using them. Pairing them to your Apple device is a snap. The AirPods take only one input from the user — a double-tap to engage Siri. I've issued the following commands with succcess:

  • "Siri, turn up the volume by half."
  • "Siri, start this song over."
  • "Siri, play the previous song."

If you're Apple Watch enabled, instead of seeing the familiar red and green icons for refusing and answering a call, you'll see the green "answer" icon is replaced with a white icon with a green outline of an AirPods earbud. Put another way, the Apple Watch is smart enough to know you're using AirPods.

Overall, I absolutely recommend these. But I encourage you to compare and contrast your use case to mine when considering my recommendation.




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