Marsboy is a company that focuses on solutions that include audio products. The last product that I reviewed by them were the bone conduction headphones. This time, I’m sharing my experience with their sport-friendly wireless ear buds. Here’s how things went for me.
The appearance of the earbuds are a combination of black plastic for the casing of each ear bud, and (in my case) a bright yellow-green that’s almost a neon in color. This color is applied to the band that connects the two buds, and an accent on each bud (with one of them doubling as a button). From what I could tell, poking around online, users could also get their accent color in a bright blue, as well as black with gray buttons on the buds. Given that these are considered for athletic use, the colors seemed to fit what I would picture someone working out might like to wear, so in that regard it didn’t strike me as offputting. The set includes replacement buds of differing sizes (a smaller and larger pair, respectively) and a standard micro USB cable for charging.
The fit seemed to hold well enough. I’m not an athletic person, so I wasn’t able to find a pickup game of anything that I could attend while wearing these, but they seemed secure enough, where I had zero concerns of it coming out, and once I’d placed the largest bud covers on them, they fit securely enough for my use case. It struck me though, that they didn’t include a set of those plastic hooks that one typically finds on sport oriented ear buds, that fit around and over the ear. Beyond the bud proper, these only have a small plastic piece that fits up against an outer portion of the ear. It does so comfortably mind you, and just helps brace it and keep it from moving around. I tend to take off those hooks though, so I can’t say I’m “missing” it in this case.
As for the battery of the earbuds, with is always a factor to be considered with Bluetooth, got me around five and a half hours of use, comprised of audio books and podcasts. As the battery was about out of juice, it gave me a simple tone, and then powered itself down approximately sixty seconds later. The range of the device only goes down to 20Hz, so I can’t say that I was all that surprised that music didn’t have any punch on the low end of the spectrum. So were I going to listen to music, it wouldn’t be with this set of headphones, and that’s one of the only two drawbacks I encountered; I’ll get to the other one later.
There is another feature that I was able to test out though, which is that these earphones can retain pairing to two different devices. Having both an Android tablet as well as an Android smartphone, I was able to pair these with both of them, and merely power them on to get them to connect to the last device I paired them with, while I can also go into the Bluetooth settings to activate it on my tablet, so it would thus maintain two active connections. While this is kind of cool (as most only can do one), it didn’t allow audio to come through from both concurrently. So, I could hear a YouTube trailer on one device, but not the song on the other until I’d paused the trailer. I guess it would come in handy though, to be able to cut over to a phone call, while I’m gaming or something on my tablet, with both connections being maintained by the ear buds. And while I’m on the topic of Bluetooth connections, Marsboy has some of the best I’ve encountered. They connect without a hitch the first time, and just about every time there after.
Lasty, I want to mention the call quality of these. From what I could hear, things didn’t sound much different than were I holding my phone right up to my head. On the other hand though, I was told that I sounded muffled, and a bit like I wasn’t holding the phone’s microphone at the proper distance from my mouth, but rather I sounded “farther away”. So, these will work in a pinch for phone calls, but aren’t exactly idea.
On the whole, these seem to do their job, though in some places they perform well (like the fit not needing the extra hooks, and the ability to maintain two active connections), while other areas seemed to be operating at the bare minimum (such as the call quality and the low end of the musical spectrum). Considering they only run $13, I can’t really complain. That being said though, you might want to look elsewhere if you are intending to use it for music and phone calls. So all things considered, I’m giving it a five.
http://www.marsboyglobal.com/marsboy-ci142-wireless-bluetooth-v4-0-swift-sports-sweatproof-stereo-earphones-green–p4.html
