Samsung Gear IconX review: Wireless earbuds with great sound—and lots of problems - hodgestherrielf

You might ask a jump off of religious belief to insert Samsung's Gear IconX wireless earbuds inside your ear canals. Indeed, equally Note7 owners showed us over the last few months, electronics packed with lithium-ion batteries can do double-responsibility as incendiary devices.

Samsung ISN't the only electronics maker to be bitten away the boom-boom shelling bug, but when you put the Gear IconX inside your ears, you can't help but consider that you're placing two 47mAh batteries on either side of your skull, and, well… what if?

Only this is the deal with with-it tech. If you deficiency in truth wire-free earbuds with satisfactory sound, 4GB of storage for connected-board music files, and nitty-gritt-rate sensors for exercise data, you may have to learn some risks.

See that lozenge-shapped window on the right earbud? That's the optical heart-rate sensor.

My clip with the Geartrain IconX hasn't been trouble-free. Battery life hasn't met Samsung's claims, the control port is annoying, and I had problem with heart-rate reporting. But I can however recommend these earbuds ($199 on Amazon), especially for exercise enthusiasts who already use Samsung phones.

The hindquarters business is the earbuds sound great, and their positives outweigh their shrewish negatives (if lone just barely).

Innovation, comfort, and user interface

I'm a huge lover of completely wire-clear earbuds. There are no tethers from earbuds to phone, and no tethers from spike to ear. Information technology's a liberating feel for, particularly when you'Re exercising, arms a-flailing. The IconX make good on their wire-free promise, specially because I find them comfortable for earbuds in this category.

Samsung provides three sizes of rubberlike eartips for customized fit, on with threesome sizes of wingtips that help keep the IconX stabilized in your ear sockets. Once properly weighted, the earbuds exactly sort of melted away into my music listening and exercise experiences. They also stayed firmly planted in my ears, and I think only a serious twig would dislodge them.

The IconX are generally comfortable to wear, and don't look too zany when they'ray sticking impossible of your ears with no wires attached.

Unfortunately, IT's not easy—operating theatre comfortable—to control the IconX from the touchpads on the earbuds themselves. You tap once to pause/resume; twice to omission music tracks; and thrice to encounter the past song. I've been victimisation the earbuds for the past 2 months, and still haven't found the mathematical number of pressure or diplomacy to properly execute each gesture. The biggest issue is activating intermit when I desire to skip tracks.

I think part of the trouble is that the touchpads have successful me gun-wary: If you tap them with rightful a bit too much pressure, the impact on your capitulum socket lands someplace 'tween annoying and painful.

Sound quality, dropouts, and ambient awareness

I'm not an audiophile, and I won't bore you with meaningless descriptions of the IconX's highs, mids, and lows. Wire-free earbuds are exercise earbuds, and when I'm elaboration, I mostly only care close to volume and bass. The IconX are blissfully loud—easily loud sufficiency to drown out the noise of exercise equipment. But even better, the earbuds sound lush and balanced crossways a wide energetic range. Bass answer is strong without sounding all over-amplified, even for hip-hop and deep-heavy pop. Nonetheless, IT took a happy chance event to find the depleted finish.

The earbuds come with the medium-sized eartips pre-installed, and for my ears, those tips deliver atrocious bass voice. But swapping in the larger eartips created a much to a greater extent snug fit, and bass reply improved dramatically. Inexplicably, Samsung doesn't make any associations between eartip size and bass voice response in its substance abuser manual, and while I was willing with the comfort of the medium-sizing tips, information technology took whatsoever experimenting to discover I needed to size up for better sound.

The Paraphernalia IconX come with three sets of wing tips and capitulum tips to help ensure a proper fit (and hefty bass).

Because all wire-free earbuds depend on Bluetooth protocols for connectivity, some degree of dropouts should be expected. Luckily, the IconX suffered goose egg dropouts when playing on-board music, and a relatively infrequent number when streaming euphony from my ring. Streaming dropouts enhanced whenever I moved my phone a lot, but these momentary annoyances—for example, threefold during an hour-long hike—were never a deal-surf.

The IconX are outfitted with microphones, fashioning them able Bluetooth headsets for call conversations. But those mics can also be enlisted by an ambient mode that lets you listen the world at large when medicine is blasting. I found the mic volume to be unnervingly loud as they picked up the crunching of leaves underfoot as I hiked up Climb on Davidson—though I guess I should be grateful that I also detected the approach of speeding mountain rockers.

Euphony sources: Connected-board and streaming

The IconX include 4GB happening-board storage for your music files, a feature you North Korean won't encounte in to the highest degree of the wire-free contest. "Serviceable" memory is quoted at less than 3.5GB, but Samsung says this is still good for about 1,000 medicine tracks. Pendant formats include MP3, M4A, AAC, WAV, and WMA v9.

Playing on-board music helps preserve barrage fire life, which you'll be grateful for, every bit I explain to a lower place. Playing tracks from intimate memory also grants a greater degree of personal freedom, as you won't need to bear your phone in your hand or sack when exercising. All in all, the on-instrument panel medicine function is a killer value-impart—with a not-then-killer user interface.

The Gear IconX Manager is basically just a dumping run aground for music tracks.

To load music into the earbuds, you get in touch the IconX to your PC via USB, then fire up Samsung's Gear IconX Manager desktop software, and dump music files from a local Personal computer directory to the manager app. It's an easy operation, simply the app doesn't support playlists, and you can't change the order of tracks. As a matter of fact, if you don't want to hear the tracks in the exact rescript in which they were loaded into the IconX Manager, you have only one recourse: Choose the Shuffle selection in the Gear mechanism mobile app to randomize playback.

As for streaming medicine, the IconX play any audio frequency that would otherwise be piped through your phone's speaker or headphone jack. But, as noted in a higher place, the earphones did suffer dropouts if I moved my phone too much, and audio stopped entirely (obviously) whenever I walked away from my call up, and exceeded the earphones' operational Bluetooth ambit of approximately 30 feet.

Finally, like all Bluetooth earphones, the IconX suffer a tur of latency, and won't synchronize perfectly with video sources. This way that if you'Ra observance a video of someone talking or singing, there testament glucinium a metre delay between what you see along screen, and when you hear the speech or lyrics. It's not an supply for abstract euphony videos, but information technology give the sack be really annoying if you'atomic number 75 observance a video interview or concert performance.

Heart-rate tracking and S Health consolidation

At CES 2014, Intel disclosed a prototype for earbuds with built-in heart rate sensors, and the world thought it was science fiction. Now, heart-order sensors are commonplace happening earbuds geared toward fitness freaks, and now Samsung checks off the box connected this value-minimal brain damage. The implementation is wonky, but if you're already victimization a Extragalactic nebula phone, you might be happy.

If you need to hear your heart-rate data directly done the earbuds, you potty toggle along "Exercise audio guide" in the Gear app. From there, unsound-imperativeness 1 of the touchpads to start a workout session, and your nub-rate information (along with other utilization metrics) will glucinium shared via a pleasant-looking robot phonation at precise intervals. You can choose between distance intervals (0.5, 1, and 5 kilometers) and time intervals (5, 10, 30, and 60 minutes).

You best have a Samsung earpiece if you want to receive Gear IconX affection-rate data via the S Health app. Other than, you'll get this error message.

I ditched the American-accented robot for a posh-sounding British woman, just still found it annoying to have my euphony interrupted by my heart-rate numbers. The audio reports get justified more disruptive when you start adding other data points like workout continuance, space, calorie cut, and speed. And you can't stop the robot from blurting out your data right in the middle of your front-runner song.

The mutually exclusive is to view your heart-rate information in Samsung's S Wellness app. E.g., you buns take to record data during an oval workout, and past watch a time period report of your current pulse in the app. This approach only makes sense if you have your phone inside Bluetooth stove, and you'ray exercising on stationary equipment. But here's the final gotcha: S Wellness volition only recognize the heart-rate information if you're exploitation a Samsung Galaxy sound. The IconX matched fine with the Galaxy S6 and S7 Edge, but when I used the earbuds with a Nexus 6P, Moto Z Droid, and Google Pixel XL, S Health would report "copulative heart charge per unit monitor," immediately followed by "spirit rate monitor scattered."

Shelling life and the bottom line

When you ditch your headphone jak for Bluetooth earphones, you suddenly have to worry about battery-life direction. Samsung claims the IconX wish deliver about 3.4 to 3.8 hours of continuous music when playing tracks off of on-control board storage, and between 1.5 and 1.6 hours when streaming music from your phone. For some folks, those fly the coop multiplication are already alarmingly short, merely I found the earbuds break down even faster than Samsung's claims.

When playing on-card music, the longest session I recorded gave me 2 hours, 40 minutes of continuous euphony. And I wasn't logging exercise information, which sucks more succus. When streaming music, I got 1 hour, 34 proceedings, which aligns with Samsung's claims, but is still woefully curtly. Can you imagine a 1.5 hour restriction on your wired earphones? Welcome to 2016.

Thusly, yeah, the Geartrain IconX are rife with problems. They're difficult to control, and Don River't always work as advertised. But, damn, they sound great and I can't accentuat how such I appreciate the freedom of a telegraph-free design and on-control panel storage. It's really easy to dump along the IconX, but the fact remains they would be my survive-to earbuds for a bunch of exercise scenarios.

Source: https://www.pcworld.com/article/410812/samsung-gear-iconx-review-wireless-earbuds-with-great-sound-and-lots-of-problems.html

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