It's only been a few years since the first true wireless earphones launched and yet the marketplace is overflowing with variations on the theme. Startup Relods is looking to stand out from the crowd with quick-swap batteries that let the music play on.
Where normally you would have to pop true wireless earbuds in the charging case when they run out of juice, and wait, the Relods earphones come with four batteries – two already mounted to the driver housings and two spares ready to magnetically take over.
All in, the mobile listening experience can rock on for up to 60 hours before the charging case needs a top up, with the earbud batteries lasting around nine hours each. Not bad, not bad at all. And the case supports wireless charging too. One potential pitfall with this approach is having to watch in horror as a clumsy attempt to change out the batteries at the exact moment the bus driver hits the brakes hard results in one of the little sweet-like modules rolling away, never to be seen again. So extra care will be needed.
The Relods earphones are built around Qualcomm's QCC3040 chipset that comes with a Bluetooth 5.2 radio with support for aptX and AAC codecs, powers true wireless connection stability, supports Google Fast Pair, boasts active noise cancellation to help filter out distractions from the outside world, and features Clear Voice Capture noise suppression technology to keep background noise down when on a call.
The buds are said to sport "professional-grade speaker drivers" for the promise of quality listening (though there's precious little info on the audio part of the equation), calls and playback can be controlled by touch, each earphone has a little wing for a secure fit, and there's IP55 water and sweat resistance too.
The startup has launched on Indiegogo to bring the Relods to life, where pledges start at US$59 – a saving of almost 50 percent on the expected retail price. The campaign has already met its modest $5,000 funding goal with a little over a month left to run. If all goes to plan, shipping is estimated to start in February 2022. The video below has more.
Source: Relods