FEATURES

Which of our earphone trio gives you the most for your money?

Optical sensors and an accelerometer detect when they’re in your ears

the AirPods integrate beautifully with an iPhone. You don’t even need to go through the usual Bluetooth pairing rigmarole – just hold your iPhone next to the charging case and a dialogue box appears on the screen. Tap OK and it’s done. The AirPods also boast optical sensors and a motion accelerometer to detect when they’re in your ears. Take them out and the music pauses; put them in and it starts up again. Brilliant.

You can access Siri with a double tap, and when you speak, ‘beamforming’ microphones filter out background noise. With no buttons on the AirPods, you’re highly reliant on Siri if you don’t want to pull your phone out of your pocket, although you can reconfigure them in the settings to play or pause when double-tapped, instead of calling Siri. The brains behind this deeply impressive interaction is Apple’s W1 chip, which also lets you squeeze five hours of listening time from a single charge. With multiple charges from the case, you can extend this by another 19 hours.

The Earin M-1s seem stingy by comparison. There’s no microphone, which rules out taking phone calls, while the three-hour singlecharge battery life is the shortest on test. Thankfully, the charging capsule provides three charges, giving you another nine hours.

The M-1s use balanced-armature speakers and Bluetooth 4.0 with aptX support, which offers a potential bump in sound quality. Earin’s app lets you adjust the balance and activate the bass-boost mode. It also tells you how much battery life is left in each earbud.

The lack of a charging case is the Bragi’s Achilles’ heel, but the six-hour single-charge battery life is impressive. Audio Transparency is useful for hearing someone talk without removing the earbuds – it works brilliantly. Knowles’ digital MEMS microphones work well in noisy traffic and wind, while noise isolation does a great job of shutting out ambient sound. The Headphones are water-resistant, so they’re fine for the gym.