Обзор беспроводных наушников Bose SoundSport

Like many of the other earbuds in this class, these are advertised and optimized for exercise. Those StayHear+ Sport eartips have a soft, durable rubber that didn’t seem to wear out at all, even after a week’s worth of heavy use. The cable feels substantial, and the build quality on the buds themselves also feels pretty great.

There is some water resistance built into these, but Bose doesn’t say what the IP rating is, just merely that they are sweat- and water-resistant. The acoustic ports have been designed and placed to resist sweat and some minor precipitation, and there’s a hydrophobic cloth as part of the construction that also serves as some protection. Our guess is that these wouldn’t fare well submerged fully in water, but they were perfectly fine in the rain and during even our most sweaty workout.

The StayHear+ Sport earpieces that Bose has chosen to include on their SoundSport line of headphones are a really unique shape. Rather than a perfectly round silicon or foam tip, they’re somewhat oval-shaped, almost as if someone crushed or crimped a normal set of tips. You’ll have size options including a ¾-inch tip, a ½-inch and one somewhere in between, but be sure to note that the curved rubber wing that holds it into your ear is attached to these tips. Those wings range from ½ inch to an inch. This makes it easy to swap out tips and wings, but it does run you the risk of being stuck with an ear tip that doesn’t fit and a wing that does, or vice versa.

You pair these headphones simply by long-pressing the power button on the right bud until it enters pairing mode. What’s nice about these headphones is that there’s a clear voice that speaks in plain English when you’re swapping between modes. It will tell you things like the battery percentage, let you know what specific device you’re paired to, and if you’re entering pairing mode, it will tell you specifically that it’s ready to pair another device. The voice is a bit robotic, but compared with other earbuds, the level of specificity is very welcome.

The rechargeable battery in these headphones was passable, but not spectacular. Bose advertises that you’ll get 6 hours of listening per full charge, and we found that to be true for the most part. Because we sometimes had to push the volume higher than other headphones, we’d occasionally get less music time.

According to Bose, it also takes two hours to charge up the headphones with the included micro-USB charging cable, but we found that it took a good deal less time than that (closer to 90 minutes). Everything is a trade-off with battery life, and when taken at face value, these headphones do a pretty good job. But, because they’re so big, we kind of expected more life out of them and were slightly disappointed at the outcome.

One key differentiating factor for Bluetooth headphones is the use of a dedicated app to customize your experience. The Bose Connect app doesn’t offer the same sorts of EQ controls or sonic molding that some other apps from companies like Jaybird do, but there are some interesting features here.

First of all, you can easily connect and disconnect devices through the app, which is a more pleasant experience than refreshing your device’s Bluetooth list. Another cool feature in the Bose Connect app is the ability to stream music between Bose devices seamlessly. That’s tremendously useful if you and your friend both have a Bose product since one unfortunate casualty of the wireless age is the fact that you can’t just bust out a splitter to share media.

One last thing to note: Bose touts a “Find My Earbuds” feature, but it only seems to work with the truly wireless SoundSport Free headphones, not the SoundSport propers.

These headphones typically sit right at $149.95. Bose rarely has sales, though, during Black Friday and other big deal weekends, we saw these available for $99.99. That price difference is a big point — $150 puts you firmly in the premium price range while $100 undercuts some of the competition’s price. For sound and build quality alone, these are probably worth the full retail price if you can afford it.

Some of the bells and whistles like the accompanying app, the Bose headphone pairing tools and the voice cues that are really specific make it a seamless product experience for the average user. But the lack of volume and some of the minor connection issues we ran into gave us a bit of pause. Again, the price is befitting of the brand, and the fit and finish is nice with a good packaging experience. So if Bose is your thing, you won’t be disappointed.