Tuesday, April 23, 2024

Fairphone Fairbuds

Samuel Gibbs:

Fairphone, the repairable and ethical electronics pioneer, is back with a pair of some of the first Bluetooth earbuds to make it so easy and cheap to replace their batteries that you can do it at home in minutes.

[…]

The earbuds have a little door hidden behind a silicone sleeve, which opens to reveal a small button battery ready to be replaced once it wears out. The design seems so simple you wonder why no one has tried it before.

The oval top of the earbuds has a touch-sensitive surface for a good set of controls. Tap once, twice or thrice for playback controls, slide your finger up and down for volume, or touch and hold on the right to switch noise-cancelling modes or the left to trigger your phone’s voice assistant. Take out an earbud and the music pauses.

Via Nick Heer:

Gibbs noted an audio sync issue which the company says it was working on. Otherwise, these seem to be perfectly fine true water-resistant wireless earbuds with approximately similar battery life to Apple’s AirPods Pro.

Previously:

Update (2024-04-24): Ged Maheux:

A huge thank you to those that wrote about my AirPod volume problem and suggest cleaning with isopropyl and a brush. Totally did the trick, they now sound as good as new.

3 Comments RSS · Twitter · Mastodon


I would consider getting these if Bluetooth wasn't so awful.


People keep saying that, yet I'm unaware of an alternative.


Microchip Kleer, for use at home.

Or, if you can stand the latency, there's always AirPlay, of course. Open implementations are available.

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