We’re finally getting first impressions and reviews of the newly-announced OnePlus Buds, the brand’s first truly wireless earbuds. It’s being touted as a budget version of the AirPods although it obviously does not come with Active Noise Cancellation like the AirPods Pro. Now we’re getting our first look at what the Buds are like out of the box, although in terms of sound quality and other technical stuff, we’ll have to wait a few more days for full reviews.
The buds come with a charging case of course and that case has an LED indicator and a hardware button as well. Just like other cases, it will hold your earbuds through magnetism and you are able to charge them inside with pogo pins. The case itself comes with a 430mAh battery inside and if you need to charge it, you’ll have to use a wall charger to plug it with a USB cord. The buds have 35mAh batteries each. How long the batteries can last will be subject to more testing.
You can connect the OnePlus Buds to your smartphone with Bluetooth 5.0 and Fast Pair. The steps are pretty quick unlike previous earbuds so all you have to do is open the case and a prompt will appear on your device. Just one or two taps and you’re all set. Make sure of course that Bluetooth is active on your phone so the prompt will show up. All the automatically set controls will start but later on, you can customize things like touch control, Dolby Atmos support, and OTA updates.
The automatic touch controls lets you advance forward one track or go back for apps like Spotify, YouTube, etc. The earbuds also automatically detect whether one or both earbuds are in your ear and then react accordingly. If you pop one or both out of your ears, the music or podcast will stop and if you put one back in, it will continue. As for the other things like sound quality especially as compared to other earbuds, we’ll know in the next few days.
The OnePlus Buds will cost around $80 in the U.S. which is indeed half the price of the AirPods. Now whether or not it is comparable sound-wise, that remains to be seen.
