XClear Wireless Earbuds with Immersive Sounds & 5.0 Bluetooth

These wireless headphones are absolutely fantastic! Battery life is superb so far, but how it ages may matter and I can't say yet. They came with a few extra silicon tips, so finding the right fit for me was relatively simple. They paired easily with my phone and laptop - I listened to music, watched videos, and did a couple of phone calls, all fantastic so far (except for issues that really aren't the fault of these headphones - see below). The case is small, opens easily and closes in a way that I feel confident will stay closed in my pocket or bag, uses USB-C, and shows the charge level. What more could you ask for? The audio quality on these is as good as, or better than, I expected. At first glance these seem a little hyped / colored, but I was not looking for reference quality listening, just a small device for calls, some videos, and lots of casual music listening. Call quality is somewhere between fine and great, though I haven't tested background noise rejection like others talking in a room while I'm on the phone yet. I assume this is going to be mediocre, and that's fine for me. These really are awesome! If you're super picky or have specific needs, read on for the couple items that may not be great for some unique situations... The noise cancelling is not really noise cancelling and they shouldn't call it that, it is passive sound reduction (as far as I can tell). With a good seal on the silicon tips, background noise is reduced nicely - just enough that you don't notice it, but not so much that you could be at risk of wandering into the path of a firetruck or anything. I did notice that interacting with the controls (tapping one earpiece or the other) sends a loud acoustic thump into my ear - am I tapping too hard? Anyway, I had to kind of teach myself to be gentler. Anyway, for noise cancelling / blocking on flights I am not expecting much here and am OK with that. Using only 1 earbud works fine, as described just leave the other in the case. Going to mono mode (so two people can listen, one from each earbud) doesn't seem to be an option, and nor does controlling music with only one earbud in (well, you get the controls that earbud offers, but no more). Maybe I just didn't understand it, and it wasn't in the Quick Start Guide or User Manual. Again, I am fine with those, but YMMV. There seems to be an incredibly slight, almost imperceptible audio lag; I really almost didn't realize it was there until it cropped up on an embedded video. And that one was fine when opened directly in YouTube, but if the only source of video for some app was causing this out of sync audio issue, it could be really annoying. Again, I think it's the app developer, not the headset in this case, but I can't say for sure. If you're just taking calls and listening to music you will probably never notice it at all; on videos, I bet almost no one would have this issue, but if you did it might be very distracting. Another weird thing was controlling volume; this headset is clearly designed to let the app / device control the volume, which means it doesn't have it's own way to adjust volume. I can't blame these for lacking that feature, but I sure wish it offered me something because some apps, especially on desktop (looking at you MS Teams) don't let users control volume and ignore the system volume in their attempt to deafen everyone. All in all, a big winner for me. At this price point the only thing I would reasonably expect to change is that the description not mention noise cancelling, or switch it to something more obvious like, "Passive isolation from background noise." Otherwise, I am super happy with these.