My wife has been helping me out with testing a pair of wireless earbuds aimed at the active set: the iClever QY8 Sweatproof Bluetooth Sports Earbuds.
After using wired headphones at the gym, she was looking for a pair of wireless earbuds. Something light, comfortable, sweatproof and–above all–wireless. Every now and then the timing is just right for these things and, just as she was asking about it, I was sent a set of QY8 Sweatproof Bluetooth Sports Earbuds from iClever.
I’m not big on earbuds and the closest I’m able to get to a gym these days is the treadmill and weights in my office. And that doesn’t happen frequently enough. My wife is at the gym almost every day, making her the perfect test subject.
She’s been using these earbuds for three weeks now and is generally quite happy with them. She says they’re very comfortable to wear, as promised sweat doesn’t bother them at all, and the sound quality is decent. She did have an issue with low volume despite maxing it using the on-bud volume control, but that’s because the earbuds don’t control the iPhone volume–once that was set higher, everything was good and the local volume controls are more of a tweaking.
In particular, she likes the fact that the range on the iClever QY8’s is long enough (officially rated at 32.8 feet) that she is able to securely lock her phone up and not carry it around the room with her. That makes working out even more convenient. There are on-ear buttons to skip forward or back a song, so, as long as she has a playlist on, she’s good.
What she doesn’t like is the recharging. There’s a micro USB port that’s covered by a tightly sealed hard plastic door and it’s tough to get off. The tight seal makes sense in a “sweat proof” product, but making the access cover out of rubber or having a pull tab or something to make it easier to remove would be a welcome improvement. Speaking of recharging, these are rated at 7 hours of music playback on charge; she makes a point of recharging them after every third gym visit and hasn’t run low yet.
I gave them a quick listen myself and found they actually fit more comfortably than most earbuds I’ve tried, and the Apt-X audio resulted in reasonable sound quality. Very crisp, but (as often happens with earbuds) very low on bass reproduction. Using the iOS equalizer to boost the bass definitely helped there. You’re not going to mistake these for $200 headphones, but I suspect most people will find the sound is just fine.
The list price on the iClever QY8 Sweatproof Bluetooth Sports Earbuds is $99.99, but they’ve been selling on Amazon for $39.99–which is a price point where I’d be more than willing to forgive a somewhat thin sound and annoying recharge process. However, at the time of righting I checked and they were on sale at $19.99, which definitely puts these in bargain territory.
Will James reviewed a different pair of iClever Bluetooth sport ear buds earlier this year, if you’d like to see another option from the same manufacturer using a different design.
Disclosure: Hisgadget provided a set of iClever QY8 Sweatproof Bluetooth Sports Earbuds for review purposes.
