When we tried the world's first true wireless earbuds almost 10 years ago, battery life for continuous listening came in at around 2 hours. The latest buds from Anker's Soundcore brand last for 12 hours, or 192 hours with a charging case that could also juice up your phone.
There's little point in wearing 12-hour buds if the phone streaming the music dies on you. Soundcore's P41i Bluetooth earphones ship with a case that crams in a 3,000-mAh battery that could keep tunes constantly thundering down your ear canal for more than a week.
But if you restrict your listening to just 6 hours per day you're now looking at about a month between plug-ins at a wall outlet. However, those figures are for use with noise cancellation disabled. Activate the app-adjustable adaptive noise cancellation to block troublesome ambient sounds so you can focus on your music, and playback time per bud is reduced to 10 hours while total time with help from the case goes down to 160 hours.
In a neat twist, that case sports a flat wrist strap with a USB-C connector at one end. This can be plugged into a smartphone to rescue a dying phone – with the company saying that there should be enough juice cooked into a fully charged case to get an iPhone 16 Pro or Galaxy S24 to 30% charge in around 40 minutes at a charging speed of up to 10 watts. So no, there's not enough here to fully charge a modern handset but it could be sufficient to get you home while immersed in audio.
As for the buds themselves, each is home to an 11-mm composite driver with bass enhancement technology for "intense, high-impact" low end. Six microphones and AI noise reduction make for voice clarity during calls. The buds are water resistant to IPX5 standards, so should survive the odd downpour or trip to the gym. Painless wireless connection should be on the cards thanks to support for Fast Pair, and it's possible to connect to two audio source devices simultaneously.
We haven't tried these earphones so can't comment on the quality of the listening experience, but they are fairly inexpensive at £79.99 in black or white. We're unsure of Soundcore's global release plans, but can confirm that the P41i buds are not currently listed on the US website.
Product page: Soundcore P41i
