They finally done it. Someone from a big
company has made an earbud or at least a part of an earbud that is battery
replaceable. Not the buds themselves, but apparently the battery of the case
is replaceable. And that you That is a baby step worth applauding. And I'm
going to try to do it. I'm going to try to open up this case in this video. But first, let's look at the rest of what's
in this box. These are the 2A's, the
Pixel Buds 2A. And they come with some tips. They come with like a little
instruction graphic pictograph thing. Oh, look at these
tips. They're colored. They're like a lilac. Extra small, small, and large.
That means medium is on the buds already. There they are. I don't know if these
tips correspond to like a colorway option. I looks like they do. It looks
like they do. Also looks like this has Is that an RGB strip or is it just a
solid I think it's just a plastic strip. It kind of looks like a diffuser like
what I don't like on the Tesla Model 3s now, the new ones. I think it's kind of
cringe that they have that. Have you seen that? Cold and has all his cards. I
was like I almost had to tuck and roll out under the pavement.
I'm not looking at this yet. We're finishing this.
This looks like it's, if not recyclable, made from recycled material, uh which is
very good. And there's no Is there a cable? This is
just a little book. There's no Look at this thing. This is like a
little pocket Bible. It's like a
phone book for ants. That's insane, but there's no There's no
charging cable. That That's insane.
You You guys can sense I'm kind of unhinged right now. Speaking of hinges,
always like to test the sound, like the fidget ability of it.
You know, just in case you want to take public transit and just mess with
people. Don't take them out though. Play the music from the speaker on your phone.
It has that familiar like enemies from Portal kind of industrial design
egg-shaped thing. The diffused LED light indicator and the
hardware pairing button right there you get to press. What I look for in a
earbud is a really tactile pairing button.
Oh, yeah. She's good for 50 million clicks. And of course, USB-C charging
on your bottom. Critically though, no discernible way to open this up and tear
it down. Uh so, I'll keep looking. If I If I look
in here I can and squint, I can see there are actually two tiny screws. I
don't know if you're going to be able to see this, Peter. If that's how you what you have to do to replace it,
I think it's probably going to be in professional territory. Maybe I have to
open this up and like pull out the innards. Uh but before we do that, let's take a look at the buds. Really glossy
on the inside. I like to do a little test where I try to see like, you know,
if I was really inebriated or something like that, can I still figure out which
one goes where? Like do they go in easily? Can I put them back in the case
like without looking? Oh, that was That did it.
That's pretty easy. And if you mess it up, Jesus, I just can't.
And if you do, can you What? Wow, they did it. They're James-proof.
I can't even demo them going in stupidly. There's also a screw at the
bottom of each one of these earbud wells that's a star pattern. I'm going to try
unscrewing that to get at the battery. Magnetic tip versus magnetic case, I
Give me that. Give me that. Come here.
Come here. If I break this, the video's over before you even get to
listen to them then. Should probably do this last, but you know what? I'm Oh,
doing it for you guys. Cool. This whole thing came off. Weird. I'm
just looking at It looks like a like a controller, like a GameCube controller
or something, you know, with that like rubber pad on the backside of the of
that button, which is I guess should be expected. And then you can also see that
this this light that the plastic's thinner there to allow that light to go
through. Now that we got her in her birthday suit here,
uh yeah, you can see it still functions. This is like It's so cool to see it like
this. Do you think anyone will just run it run it naked like this?
Kind of cool. And then they have this little paper tab.
And if you give it a pull, oh, this whole thing slides out. And
there's like these little kind of pogo pins on the inside. And then this is
like the battery caddy that connects from that little pad right there
and holds the battery. Rechargeable lithium-ion battery, 1600
Amphitheatre Parkway, Mountain View. I I thought that was going to tell me the
milliamp hours or something. No. Okay, this battery module, I have a feeling
you wouldn't actually get to replace that little little candy on the inside.
You'd probably replace the whole caddy and that. It's probably glued in there.
It doesn't seem to want to come out. And it's also I don't want to say keyed, but
this little bit almost looks like a rivet a rivet that's like gone through
there and bent over. Now on here it says g.co/pixelrepair,
which brings you to a generic site. So, you got to type in
your What number is this? A serial number? And they put it in such a
convenient spot. It's actually written in the well in
here, but it's not written straight down. It's written on the lip of it. So,
in order to read that, you have to hold it like this and shoot your eye to try
to read this thing that is blocked by this thing. It's the worst. And
it's so tiny. Guys, we paused for a second. We had like three different
people try to read this. We had like our phone flashlights on it. It's insanely
tiny. So, okay. Thank you, but like make this easy
on me. Going through the website, it doesn't really look like they have it
set up yet where like there's definitely not a product page where you can just
buy these right now. I don't know if that'll ever be a thing. Maybe you have
to contact them and they'll send you one. I don't know how it's going to work, but I'm glad that there's, you
know, some opportunity or room for it to possibly work at some point. We'll see.
There is a little QR code on this thing though. I'm going to try that.
If your own phone can't scan the QR code,
you got problems. It says move back to improve focus, Reese.
That means the people who work there don't run Pixels. All right, enough with
the case. Let's get these in the ears and see how they fit. They are different
than last ones cuz they don't have these like big little dangly wings anymore.
They do have these little nubbings on them.
Um but overall, they're kind of smaller and lighter. They're stemless, which
means you're going to be relying on the touch capacitive swipy dealy.
Oh, yeah. All right. Noise canceling is on.
They feel pretty connected to my body,
you know. They're one with my cranium.
I just don't want to headbang too hard right now. I'm very I'm very I was on a plane today. I'm stiff. DMS did say that
on repeated tests with this, he was able to get a very consistent seal
in our dummy head. He even got it to seal with two different sizes of ear
tips, which wasn't true of last year's. I probably need two different sizes.
You guys ever do that? One medium, one large? It feels wrong.
That's actually not statistically uncommon. Oh, this is cool. I like to plug this
back in now.
Damn, that's satisfying. If you're talking to me, I can barely hear you.
You're canceled. You know, let me try to let me try the ambient noise.
Is it going to I haven't even paired them.
That's why I can't change modes. Let's get these turned on and listen to music
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and get 20% off a plan today. I was on a
flight today with like XM5s and I don't think they seal very well with my head
cuz the noise canceling sucked. You're like take it on and off and it's like is
there even a difference? These, big difference. All right, I held down the
pairing button. Boom, here they are. Let's connect. Add Pixel Buds 2A to Find
Hub so you can locate the device when it's even when it's disconnected. Use it
in a legal way. Don't just slip this into a stranger's
back pocket and use it to find out where they live. This noise canceling is
better than the Nothing Pro 3s that I tried last time.
Okay, these I would say are for bass heads, but they're not like
comically wrong. Um ooh, my ears.
Like the Nothings were out of the box before I put that special EQ that Labs made
onto them, which helped it a lot. Um those were like My music is obviously
playing incorrectly. And those were similar to AirPods Pro 3s honestly in
the amount of bass. These Pull up the graph. These do have a lot
of bass. Within that range of what most people like, it's on the upper end. And
I would say like these are kind of bassier than I would want, at least for
metal. I was just listening to rock music, right? The problem though with
these is this scooped-out trough in like the upper mids low treble over here.
They have this warm sound, um but it just feels like something's
missing. It feels like the whole thing is kind of too bassy, but then with like
sparkly kind of overcooked highs on top.
Um fortunately, you can tune these a little bit. You can EQ them a little bit
in the app. Comparing to last gen, you can see that this one is just like a
warmer version. Last gen, it was cooler. But the more interesting comparison is
actually the Pro 2s, which look fairly close, but
this is kind of just a better version. So, the these new buds are the red line
and you can see that they're just way more consistently in band compared to
the blue. Whilst they still having kind of the
same weakness that again that trough in the in the low treble. And then
comparing to the AirPods 4, not the Pros,
just the regular 4s that which do have active noise cancelling. Uh and we had
active noise cancelling on on these Google Pixel Buds uh throughout all
these tests by the way. On this graph, you can see that where
you're really going to gain here is consistency because this graph doesn't
show it, but we had we were just all over the place every time we put those
AirPods in. It sealed differently and then particularly in the bass,
sometimes it looked like it just really fell off, and then sometimes it it did a
better job. In the in this average, you can see the average is still quite a
steep roll off compared to the lower notes that you can get out of these more
consistently. And one other big difference you can see here is where the buds really drop off
around 1.5K, the AirPods still have that little peak
there, so that's going to make them probably a little more shouty or honky,
But if you're not happy, you can go into the app the app air quotes app and do
some EQing. Let's check it out. The reason I'm doing air quotes for the app
is because you actually don't need to download an app. All of it is in the settings of your
Android device. No guarantees for iPhone, I don't know what that looks like. So, here we are in the Bluetooth
kind of details page, and you can see there's just some extra things. You can
see we have a couple of quick controls for you know some of the things that are actually on the buds themselves like
switching between noise cancellation, transparency, and off. You can just
manually do it there. You can choose the notifications and preferences for your
digital assistant which which can actually be Gemini on these.
And you can turn on or off the the ability to have like the multi-connect
thing where like I'm listening on my laptop, now I'm listening on my phone.
You can also launch even more settings. And now that we're in here, we can
finally see the EQ and also the touch controls which let's just take a little
side quest there. Use touch controls is just on or off,
that's kind of cool just in case sometimes you do get those like false
positives, so it's it's nice to have that. They really
give you like no ability to change the controls.
The only thing you can change is what the long press does, and that
can either be the noise cancelling or it can be the digital assistant. You got a
single tap for pressing play like normal, the double for next, the triple for back. That's all normal, but you
can't change any of that, and critically, you can't adjust the volume.
Even like like I don't like adjusting volume with swipes, that sucks, but you can't
even do that. You can on the Pros, so I guess are they like paywalling that?
Personally, I I think that's just like bonkers. That's
not something that you should like have to pay extra for. It's just bad if you
don't have it, that stinks. Um I really don't like having to take my
phone out of my pocket or reach down and and touch it just to adjust the volume,
so You got your ear tip seal check. Here's
the oh balance, what? Is this like if
one of my ears is better than the other?
It is. It's just like your in your s- car stereo.
I can like share earbuds with my like
aged father-in-law. I could turn him up and keep me low.
That's kind of interesting, but I'll probably never use that personally,
might be great for you though. And what we have been looking for, the equalizer.
It's a lot more Mickey Mouse than some of the equalizers I've seen.
Uh as you can see, you only get five knobs, and they go up and down. Uh it
doesn't really say decibels, minus 16 plus 60, whatever that
means. Uh they have what? Do they have Yeah, some presets. Heavy bass, light
bass, balanced. You can see them move around, and then if I tweak one, can I I
can save it? It's just called last saved. Can I save multiple? You can't
have like profile 1 2 and 3. That stinks. And then there's an option to
turn the volume EQ off. That's that's like it. When you turn it down, certain
frequencies get boosted up because your ear isn't isn't as sensitive to all
frequencies equally. Does that make sense? The battery life kind of mid,
honestly. Not very impressive. 7 hours from the buds themselves is nice, but
you're only getting 20 total listening time
with the case. That's with active noise cancelling on. It's a pretty slim case,
but it's not smaller than an AirPods case, and that battery life is
definitely worse. You do get 1 hour of listening
from just 5 minutes of charge, so that's cool.
But I mean maybe this matters to you or not. Like maybe you got your watch, you
put it on your bedside, you charge everything every day, you'll be fine.
They're IP54 rated, so splashes and like
wearing them in the gym, sweat's not going to mess with them. This is not an exceptional rating, it's very it's a
basic rating even on on budget earbuds. So, what do I think of these guys? I
think they're okay. They're okay. I think the out-of-the-box sound profile
is better than some, and you have some ability to EQ though I don't see any
ability to upload your own custom EQ like we could on the Nothings which it
was dope. Um so I'm that's kind of sorely missed here, but you know,
they're pretty fine, and if you are just kind of on the fence or ambivalent about
which ones you're going to get, maybe vote with your wallet and get these ones
that have the repairable battery thing just as a you know, a signal that you
think that is important to have, and you want other people to do it. Thanks for
watching ShortCircuit guys. If you like this video, go check out my unboxing of
the Nothing 3s that I did a couple weeks ago, or Linus' look at the new AirPods
Pro 3s. That's what they're called, right? There's so many combinations of
numbers and Pros and non-Pros and Gleven.