One of the first companies to venture into the world of
making truly wireless earbuds has revealed a second generation product.
Bragi, the company that turned $3.3 million of Kickstarter funding into the Dash,
just announced a new pair of wireless earbuds simply called the
Headphone. The Headphone is based on the Dash in many ways — the new
earbuds sport the same size, overall design, and basic function — but
they're cheaper and much simpler. Bragi will sell the Headphone in
retail channels for $149 this November, but you can preorder them
starting today for $119.
You can use the Headphone to take or make phone calls and
activate your phone’s voice assistant, they allow for basic streaming
music playback (though there's no onboard storage this time around), and
they swap the Dash's touch controls for physical buttons. The Headphone
has the Dash’s audio pass-through feature, where you can hear the
outside world in your headphones, but there’s no fitness tracking, and
the carrying case doesn’t recharge the earbuds when you stow them away.
As Bragi CEO Nikolaj Hviid put it to The Verge: “the Headphone is a racing bike, where the Dash is much more like a Formula 1 car.”
The benefits of taking the Dash and dumbing it down a bit
are threefold, and the first is that dramatic price cut. (Backers of
the Dash Kickstarter will also get an extra $20 off, bringing the price
down to $99.) Second, the Headphone will be capable of squeezing twice
the life — six hours — out of the same 100 mAh battery found in the
Dash. Third, the Bluetooth connection between the earbuds and your phone
should be stronger, according to Bragi.
Better
battery life and a lower sticker price seem like luxuries compared to
the prospect of an improved (or even reliable) Bluetooth connection.
Tenuous Bluetooth connections are the problem that has most consistently plagued the first generation
of truly wireless earbuds. It’s the kind of problem that kills the
whole idea of the product in the first place, but it was one that
startups were willing to roll with if it meant beating the likes of Jabra, Samsung, or even Apple to market.
Bragi was no exception. While the company went out of its
way to replace the Bluetooth connection that syncs the two earbuds
together (it chose a hearing aid technology called Near Field Magnetic
Induction instead), Bragi still used Bluetooth for the phone-to-earbud
connection. This led to hiccups in the audio streaming during my time
with the Dash, especially when the phone was in my pocket or out of the
line of sight. Hviid says that Bragi was able to use everything it
learned from the Dash about this problem to fix the experience on the
Headphone, but we’ll have to get our hands on the new product to make
that call for ourselves.
The other problem Bragi ran into with the Dash was
production delays. Bragi says that the Headphone is supposed to start
shipping in early November, but Hviid told me that the company isn’t
starting production until October — a tight turnaround, even for a
company with one product under its belt.
In
addition to the Headphone, Bragi also announced another firmware update
to the Dash today. The company promises that this update — version 2.1 —
will improve the accuracy of the Dash’s heart rate tracking, as well as
improve the Bluetooth connection. It follows the 2.0 update issued this
past summer, which made the Dash louder and allowed for better fitness
tracking. With 2.1, Hviid said the company has been working for months
to work around the consequences of having a lot of radios in a very
small headset. “All of these components, it’s a huge amount of
components, and they disturb the Bluetooth range,” Hviid said. “But most
people will see remarkable improvements with 2.1. We’re actually very
proud of what we’ve done.”
Hviid was careful to note that customers shouldn’t expect
software updates like these for the Headphone. “The Dash is a computer,
the Headphone is a headphone,” he said.
No comments:
Post a Comment