Jabra Elite 65t Earbuds

Quick Summary: The audio quality is only as good as true-wireless earphones less than 1/3 the price, connectivity is middling and requires multiple special apps, the physical buttons are stiff and from a low-end product 2 years ago, the charging case doesn't work well and is very hard to get open, and the fit of the earphones in the ears is only slightly above average. However they do have a lot of features, the passive noise isolation is good, and they have extremely long battery life for true-wireless earphones. I can't speak to the voice-pickup and voice-isolation of these, which seems to be an off-target feature for true-wireless headphones and their primary claim of quality. Fit & Feel ---- The earphones themselves are a bit on the larger side for true-wireless earphones, but that's the trade-off for the battery life they provide. They also don't stick out of your ears like you're the Communications Officer from the Original Star Trek like Bose and Senhauser products do. They do fit into the arches of your ear very well and comfortably, and seat incredibly solidly. As long as you have the correct ear-tip that actually fits just into your ear canal as instructed, they fit solidly into your ear with no worries about them coming loose or falling out even under vigorous exercise. The ear-tips are a bit oddly formed though relative to the industry standard. They have a more trapezoidal-shape to them rather than a partial-sphere-shape, and it's noticeable in how they feel within your ears. I'm not sure if the ear-tip shape is supposed to provide better passive noise isolation, but it has no noticeable difference for me, and it actually causes extra pressure within the ears. I've found that the best measure of in-ear headphone quality is how comfortable your ears feel during extended wear, and these Jabras have come up a bit lacking. I've tried some other true-wireless headphones and been able to wear them completely comfortably for 3+ hours sitting at a desk, at the gym, or on a run. With the Jabras, my ears start feeling a bit pressed on the inside at around 1.5 hours and I feel like I need to take a break from them to let my ears relax. I've heard others call this feeling an "itchy" feeling in the ear, and that also describes it well. This is roughly what I get from middling-quality in-ear headphones made by any manufacturer and not what I'd expect from a product anywhere near this price point. These earphones also emit a slightly concerning heat from the inner side of them when in use. It almost feels like the battery inside each earphone gets pretty warm during use, enough that it's noticeable around the area of the earphone body where the battery contacts are located. I thought I was crazy at first, but I took them out to check, and the inner side of them was definitely noticeably above skin-surface temperature. It's not hot enough that it's uncomfortable, just noticeable and worth mentioning. It very well might be related to the "in-ear detection" feature that can be used to auto-pause since I don't see any visible sensors on the inside of the earphones other than the over-sized battery contacts that might be doubling as a resistive sensor. Controls ---- The control scheme on these earphones is pretty much bland-standard for any Bluetooth device, you have an up and down button on one earphone, and a multi-function button on the other. The up and down button primarily control volume, but on a long press do next and previous. The multi-function button is largely a play-pause toggle, or when a call comes in it's a tap to accept and double-tap to reject button. If you're not on a call, you can also double-tap to toggle the HearThru mode, and long press to trigger the voice assistant. With an up and down button on an earphone that may be oriented at a different angle for every person, they've smartly added little tactile tick marks to indicate where the center of the up and down areas are. However instead of the buttons truly being oriented in something approaching an up and down, they're oriented along an upper-back to lower-forward diagonal that will never vary enough from individual to individual to actually approximate up and down or forward and back. Furthermore, standard control organization generally associates the same functionality with up and forward, and with down and back. This mixes that up so it always takes a second to think about whether you're pushing an "up" button or a "back" button when you press the upper-back button, buttons that would normally have exactly oppposite effects. Unfortunately they seem to have tried to shy away from the capacitive/resistive touch buttons completely with this product, instead using stiff physical buttons. While this makes it less likely you'll accidentally press a button, it works very poorly for true-wireless headphones. Unlike most headphones, true-wireless headphones have no structure to resist you pushing the earphone deeply into your ear when you have to push a physical button. With stiff buttons, this problem is even worse. These earphones are clearly made by someone who doesn't understand that at all, because pushing any of the buttons at all requires enough force to be distinctly uncomfortable both in your ear canal and the area outside your ear. Double tapping actually becomes nearly impossible because each press moves the earpiece so significantly out of position and into the flesh of your head, that your finger motion is more than that necessary for a key on a standard computer keyboard. Releasing the button enough to then press it again while trying to blindly maintain your finger's orientation relative to the earphone is extremely difficult as a result, which is the very reason all modern manufacturers use touch-sensitive buttons that require minimal finger motion to tap and double-tap. Battery Life & Connectivity ---- The battery life on these true-wireless headphones is hugely beefy compared to all other products in the market. Unfortunately that's not as big a benefit as most people would think, and it seems to largely be a necessity for support of some of the "unique" features they provide. Most true-wireless headphones have a continuous battery life of about 2-4 hours before they need to be recharged, depending on the product, the volume they're used at, the distance from the phone, and other various specialty features they may have. Listening to music sitting at a desk with my phone next to me and HearThru mode disabled, I've had these last 6 hours and still report 25% battery life remaining. However the HearThru mode that plays ambient noise thru the earphones to allow situational awareness seems to have a huge impact on battery life, doing the same with HearThru enabled put me down to 25% battery life in just 3 hours. However, considering this puts them on the upper end of the industry standard battery life even when a battery hogging feature is on, that's quite impressive. I haven't test what the impact to battery life is if the step counting mode is also turned on, or if you're mostly making phone calls instead of listening to music/podcasts. I also haven't tested the impact on battery when you're about 6 feet away from your phone on average and occasionally walk 20 feet away from it to grab something (like when I go to the gym). However the existing tests do seem to indicate a very respectable battery life could be expected. Connectivity quality of these earphones is unfortunately a bit shoddy, though not as bad as budget true-wireless devices from years past. The earphones do consistently and unerringly connect to each other, which is much better than some products, but seem to have issues with the connection to the phone. This might be an effect of how they've been forced to setup their connection with the phone to support some of their "unique" features, but it's generally unacceptable. Like almost all true-wireless earphones, one of the earphones is a master device and one's a slave, with the slave earphone connecting only to the master earphone while the master earphone connects to the slave and whatever other devices your "headphones" are connected to. Like most Bluetooth headphones in general, this requires putting the "headphones" (the master earphone) into a pairing mode, then searching for it as a new device on your phone. Also like most nice Bluetooth "headphones" that support being paired with multiple devices simultaneously, once paired the "headphones" will maintain a prioritized list of devices with preference given to the most recently paired. Given the connection issues between the master earphone and the phone however, this process can be rather onerous. Almost 50% of the time I've used these earphones I've had to forget the device on my phone and repair it to access the "advanced" features it provides. While I've never had any issues that required re-pairing when just using them like regular headphones, any voice assistant functionality, HearThru toggle, or EQ setting changes (I've never tried the step counting), have required re-pairing the devices so the Jabra apps recognize it properly and provide these functions. This appears to occur because Jabra actually requires two apps be installed to use the extra features of their earphones, one app to modify the settings and one app to intercept what your earphones send to your phone so it can determine if that should modify your settings, toggle the customizable voice assistant, etc. Sound & Audio Quality ---- For such a high-cost device, the playback quality on these earphones is suprisingly mediocre, even among true-wireless headphones. The customizeable EQ settings allow you to add a little more bass or treble, or whatever you feel might be lacking in default output of most headphones, but even cranked to the extremes of the EQ range, none of the differences seem hugely different from the default flat EQ. In comparison to low-end Bose wireless headphones (not true-wireless Bose) that cost less than these, these Jabra earphones sound completely standard rather than anything approaching high-end or premium like they claim. They do do a decent job of passive noise isolation, but once again it's only about average. A number of other average in-ear headphones, wired, wireless, and true-wireless, all have unnoticeably different passive noise isolation. This includes devices that are less than 1/6th the cost of these Jabra earphones. It seems one of Jabra's major claims with these is that they provide premium levels of voice isolation with these earphones for when you're talking in a call. I'm not sure why they've decided to focus on this, since true-wireless earphones aren't really intended for this purpose and are notoriously bad at it during the best of times. I personally have no use for this, I'll switch to my Plantronics wireless headset that gives me 10x the quality for 1/2 the price if I need voice isolation from the mic. In fact, them implementing the isolation via 2 mics in each of the earphones working together seems like an odd choice, since most people jumping on a call where they'd need the voice isolation from the mic probably don't want to fiddle with independently putting two separate devcies in their ears and will likely want to put in only the single master device so you can better hear yourself, which won't give you as good of voice isolation. Furthermore, the focus on voice isolation from the mic seems to have strongly negatively impacted the HearThru feature that seems much more useful to me. "Unique" Features ---- Alexa as a voice assistant. Unless you specifically want Alexa as your voice assistant, this actually makes the product worse. The Bluetooth standard has a common way to trigger the native voice assistant so almost any Bluetooth 5.0 device can do it without an app being required on your phone. Jabra is trying to make it configurable to select between triggering your native voice assistant (Siri or Google Assistant) and Alexa. This means they have to use and intercept a non-standard Bluetooth command from the earphones that gets interpreted by the settings app to trigger the right one. Given the extreme connectivity issues with this intercepting application, it means that instead of simply losing the ability to use some of the highly specialized features they provide, you're also losing the ability to trigger the native voice assistant when the connectivity fails. If they weren't supporting Alexa as an optional voice assistant, they could use the standard Bluetooth 5.0 command that would always trigger the native voice assistant. HearThru. A great idea, allowing situational awareness by replaying the ambient noises without delay so you can effectively cancel the passive noise isolation. This isn't a unique feature to Jabra, other products like the Samsung Gear X have it also. Unfortunately Jabra's focus on voice isolation from the mics seems to have severely degraded this much more useful feature. The audio that comes thru when HearThru mode is enabled is tinny, slightly staticy, and quiet. It's bad enough that the feature is barely useful, only serving to let you hear particularly loud noises that would normally be reduced to minor background noises by the passive noise isolation of the ear-tips. Most importantly, this doesn't work well enough to enable it and actually have a conversation with someone without feeling like you can't hear yourself, meaning it doesn't implement Jabra's "Hear yourself in calls" feature for real-world interactions. Hear yourself in calls. If you're actually trying to use both earphones while in a call, you are going to have problems with the passive noise isolation making your voice sound weird to yourself. It makes a lot of sense to replay your voice in your own ears in this case. If you're also going to have heavy voice isolation from the mic, it also makes a lot of sense to supply that audio instead of all ambient audio while you're in the call. This seems like a minimum necessary feature if someone is actually going to use these earphones for making calls. Auto-pause on removal. An interesting feature that doesn't rely on connectivity with the app. Since the earphones only have a button capable of pausing on the right ear, this makes a lot of sense for the left ear. Since the button on the right ear is stiff and hard to press, it also makes some sense for the right ear. This feature could be made completely unnecessary if the buttons were less stiff and a way to pause were provided from both earphones like most products have.