truly wireless headphones

You have to admit that Microsoft under Satya Nadella’s CEO-ship has really gained a whole lot of perspective. They aren’t just the OS company anymore. Nadella’s vision for Microsoft was to always make it as ubiquitous as the air you breathe, which is why we now have elements like Microsoft Azure, OneDrive, Outlook, Skype, Windows, Teams, LinkedIn, embedded deep into everything we do. Wherever you go, if there’s an enterprise involved, Microsoft has a solution somewhere allowing it to function seamlessly… and that ability to cross the T’s and dot the I’s is what makes Microsoft’s products great. In fact, they’ve got a thriving hardware setup too, and the reason why Microsoft’s hardware works so great (unlike its failed acquisition of Nokia under Steve Ballmer), is its ability to be a holistic software powerhouse. Take for instance Microsoft’s Surface Headphones. In a market flooded with headphones (and pretty competitively priced ones too), Microsoft’s Surface Headphones have a crystal clear vision of their purpose.

Unlike every other pair of wireless headphones out there, the Surface Headphones 2 aren’t just built for music… they’re built for work too. Given that we’re in an era dominated by Zoom and Skype meetings, the Surface Headphones 2 also focus on the ‘conference’ aspect with the same emphasis as the music aspect. They come with a comfortable design that allows them to be worn for hours (because meetings can go into overtime), have a day-long battery life, pack a whopping 13 levels of active noise cancellation in, so you can drown out sounds like the living-room TV or your kid screaming in the hallway… and perhaps the most mindful feature yet, a dedicated microphone muting button that allows you to quickly alternate between talking to your colleagues and yelling at your kids to keep the noise down.

Obviously Microsoft didn’t know a pandemic would upend businesses, forcing everyone to work from home (I refuse to entertain the conspiracy theory that Bill Gates was in on the COVID thing all along)… but the Surface Headphones 2 come at a perfect time, allowing people to conference more effectively from their home-offices. The headphones boast of the same clean design from last year, and feature 40mm Free Edge drivers to produce stunningly immersive sound that’s perfect for listening to music. The headphones come with dedicated ring-dials on the outside that allow you to control the volume and the noise-cancelation, so you can either completely drown external sound out, or blend them in, allowing yourself to be immersed in audio yet aware of your surroundings. Like all smart headphones, you can tap, hold, and swipe on the Surface Headphones too, performing activities like controlling playback, answering calls, or summoning the voice assistant… and if you’ve got an active Microsoft 365 subscription, you can even dictate text to the Headphones hand have your laptop type it out in Word, Outlook, or any of Microsoft’s other surfaces… Pretty clever, eh?

Designer: Microsoft

Making you look sort of like an off-brand Princess Leia, these little black ear-cups are the world’s first truly wireless headphones. In short, they’re the sound you’d get from a good pair of Sennheiser or Beats by Dre cans, with the portability of the Airpods.

I distinctly remember the sheer ridicule that the Airpods were subjected to when they were announced back in 2016, with practically zero foresight of exactly what a phenomenon (and status symbol) they’d become in just the next few years… and chances are that we may get to see history repeat itself with the Human Inc. truly wireless headphones. The two unsuspecting cups rest on your ears as opposed to in your ears, giving you the convenience of the Airpods, but with much better sound and hopefully better battery life. They build on the functionality of truly wireless earphones too, with a much larger, easier to navigate touch surface, along with the ability to actively translate as many as 11 languages in real-time, a feature that Google debuted with their Pixel buds.

The Human Headphones pack not one but two 30mm audio drivers per ear-cup, giving you four speakers in total that provide a feeling comparable to having a 2.2 sound system. The speakers come with beamforming microphones that can pick up your audio without the noise around you, allowing you to answer calls as well as communicate with your smart device without any interference, and two 280mAh batteries provide the Human Headphones with a usage cycle of 9 hours on a full charge.

The best bit about the headphones are the fact that you can still use them when you’re charging them… not as headphones, but snapped together, as a Bluetooth speaker! The extra set of audio drivers per earpiece come handy when it comes to belting out audio into the surroundings, rather than into your ears.

Although it would seem weird to walk around the city in these wireless ear-cups, I imagine it wouldn’t be too difficult to get used to them. Designed to be worn everywhere you would wear your Airpods, the Human Headphones come with the ability to blend outside audio into your mix too, so you don’t end up completely tuning the world out; and when you experience earphone fatigue (it’s a real thing), you can easily use the Human Headphones together as a bonafide Bluetooth speaker… besides, with a $250 price tag, that’s much more than your Airpods could ever hope to offer you, right?

Designer: Human Inc.