Impressions: Sony Noise Canceling Earbuds WF-1000X

A while back Slickdeals pushed a deal — Sony’s noise canceling earbuds on eBay for just $69.9…

Couldn’t resist. Bought one, and picked up two more for a coworker and Jipiss.

In the end it arrived with no customs fee, but it was overweight, so shipping cost 10 extra yuan — which I magnanimously passed on to Jipiss and made him pay.

Shipping took about two weeks, which is actually acceptable. It arrived safely, and I spat out my drink the moment I saw it…

It was advertised as refurbished, and sure enough there’s no packaging — just a refurbished-unit instruction sheet…

I expected it to be bare-bones, but not this bare-bones…

Good thing all the necessary accessories were there, so I guess it’s fine.

The firmware wasn’t the latest out of the box. You have to go download a dedicated WF-1000X management app from the Google Play Store yourself and update the firmware. The most stable device for the firmware update was a OnePlus phone — the iPhone kept disconnecting, the XZP kept disconnecting…

Once updated to the latest 1.03 firmware, the earbuds work. The way you use them: take the left earbud out to pair, then the right one connects automatically, and you’re good to go.

Honestly, at first the disconnects were frequent — borderline unusable. Later I put the earbuds back in the case to charge them fully, and then followed a “normal usage style,” and in the end it felt pretty good, acceptable.

What’s this “normal usage style”?

The steps are as follows:

1. Put the earbuds back in the case and charge them fully.
2. When you want to use them, take them out of the case, pair, and use.
3. When you’re done, put the earbuds straight back in the case and snap the lid shut — they go to sleep automatically and disconnect, and next time you take them out they power on automatically.

Following that flow, I found I hardly ever ran into disconnection problems. If you don’t regularly use the case to charge, or you’re low on battery, you’ll get intermittent drops.

Battery life is decent. The case can charge the earbuds four times; I used them on and off for 6 hours, put them back in the case, and they weren’t dead.

This thing has plenty of upsides:

1. Convenient — extremely convenient, and comfortable. I even want to sell off a bunch of my audiophile gear.
2. Good sound. It can’t reach APTX, but the tuning is balanced rather than mindless boom-boom. That’s rare in this kind of product.
3. Strong battery life — way better than the stupid Edifier Bluetooth earphones I bought before, which lasted 1 hour.

And the things that annoy me about this product:

1. The case can’t show battery level, so I have no idea how much charge is left in it.
2. No track skip/previous control on the earbuds…
3. Noise canceling… basically useless. Not completely useless, I guess — it lets you hear songs clearly in public, which counts as a good-enough feature?
4. No APTX support.

I’ve used these earbuds for over two days — running, commuting, all of it — and they exceeded expectations. Not nearly as bad as the internet says; I even rarely get disconnects. Maybe it’s because I’m using a Walkman ZX300?

There’s also an anecdote: when the earbuds first arrived, they paired quickly with an iPhone, and quickly with a OnePlus 5 — but they wouldn’t pair with Sony’s own XZP phone and I had to reboot the phone… Embarrassing.

Oh, right — here’s something even more annoying: since it’s a refurbished unit, there are marks on the earbuds. Mine were minor, but Jipiss’s were fairly obvious. Not my problem, though.

Under 450 yuan for a gadget like this — I think it’s a good deal.