UL Earbuds?

David,

Not necessarily a recommendation but more of a data point.

I’ll weigh them later but my Jaybird X3s are Bluetooth only.  Since they have a rechargeable battery, I very much doubt that any Bluetooth headphone in this class will be appreciably lighter than 11 grams and I’d only opt for them if you’d like a wireless experience.  The Jaybird Freedoms should be lighter, but I believe their battery life is only a couple hours, which for me, excluded them from consideration.

I used the X3s this past week while traveling and I didn’t notice an appreciable loss in my phone’s battery life.  The iPhone 6’s battery isn’t all that great to begin with, but I didn’t find myself charging it more than usual.

The X3 battery is pretty good in its class at eight hours and competes directly with the Beats X.  Where you may find weight creep for trips where you may go over eight hours of headphone use is if you need to bring additional batteries and cable to recharge the headphones that you would otherwise leave at home.  The X3 also needs a proprietary cradle  to charge it where the Beats X uses a lightning cable.

A couple examples of how this might play out is that if you’re bringing an Anker battery and lightning cable to charge your iPhone anyways, and you’re a Beats X owner, the only added weight would be the headphones themselves.  If you own the X3s, then you need to add a micro USB and Jaybird cradle to your kit.

But, if like me, you’re bringing a micro USB cable anyways to recharge your Steripen, or happen to bring an Android device, then the only added weight is the cradle, which can’t be more than a gram or two.

While I do like the Jaybird X3s, if I were to do it again, I’d go with the Beats X for three reasons:

1. To avoid dealing with the Jaybird charging cradle;
2. For the Beats Fast Fuel tech which provides two hours of play time after five minutes of charging; and
3. Regardless of where I’m using them, I like to just leave the headphones hanging around my neck and just tuck them in under my shirt when not in use.  With the Jaybirds, they mostly stay in place but I’ve had them start to slide off my neck before.  The design of the Beats X seems to work better at keeping them secure on your neck, although I don’t own a pair yet to speak from personal experience.

But, I wouldn’t steer anyone away from the Jaybird X3s.  For what they are, the sound quality is pretty good.  One of the biggest selling points for the Jaybird ecosystem is their My Sound app.  Make no mistake,  no headphone that plays digitized music via Bluetooth will be accused of being audiophile quality, but they are “decent enough.”  Another selling feature is that they roll up pretty small compared to other Bluetooth headphones.