 Oh man, they're finally here. New buds who dis? So back in October, Microsoft announced these tiny pop socket looking satellite dishes for your ears. They're the Surface Earbuds and they're the company's first attempt at a fully wireless in-ear bud and seven months later they're finally available for an asking price of $200. But in the time that they announced them to the time they finally shipped them, we have seen so much happen in the wireless earbud world and these little guys, they might be too little, too late. So let's get into it. The Surface Earbuds come in a large plastic pill shaped case that looks a lot like a giant Tic Tac. It has a USB-C port, a pairing button and on the inside an indicator light. Currently there's one color option that Microsoft calls light gray or glacier but these are bright white. They come in white with dark gray coming later. Because there's no wireless charging, the case is really light and the click feels more like a slap of two plastics than it does a click. It's also a little hard to get the buds out of the case because there's no grooves to get your finger under when you attempt to detach the buds from the magnets that are holding them in. You have to be able to get leverage on like a really slim piece of the bud that actually sticks out of the case. I was able to get the hang of it but I could see people actually having trouble with this. Now the buds themselves are unique. Overall the design just looks like a pop socket. A flat satellite looking exterior and a bike seat-esque earpiece. They're IPX4 water resistant so you should be good in some light rain, should definitely be fine working out in them and you have three size options for tips. Small, medium and large. And y'all I gotta be honest I rock the medium size tip and these fit really well and they're actually super comfortable. I went hours upon hours of wearing these things and never really felt them in my ears or experienced any discomfort. No one ear is the same and there are going to be people that these are simply not going to work for. But I started slacklining recently and I've been wearing these while doing that and since I'm very new to the sport my arms are going everywhere, I'm constantly falling off the line and these never fell out once. So from dancing to chewing to running these stayed in my ears. But since they stick so far out of my ears, go to put a backpack on, go to take a sweatshirt off and these come off too. And when you pay a lot of money for a piece of tech it is quite horrifying to see them tumble down the sidewalk. I just overall wish that they didn't stick out of my ear quite as far. But with how far these stick out of your ear there's one thing that they should definitely be good at and that's picking up your voice. It's time for the mic test and this time, kitchen edition. Alright so friends today we have the Microsoft Surface Buds, Samsung Buds Plus, we got the Google Pixel Buds and then I gotta be honest guys I still take calls on wired Apple headphones because I think this is the gold standard of microphones. Alright so first with no noise in the background these are the Surface earbuds. These are the Pixel Buds that were also recently released. With these it was all about them not being super comfortable to wear for a long time but god I love that Google Assistant. Man whenever I put the Galaxy Bud Pluses back on I'm like yeah these are pretty comfortable. These feel, these feel right in my ears. I know it's a weird addition to this competition but I have to admit friends like when I want to take a call and I need to know that someone can hear me I just pull these out. The reason I chose the kitchen to do this mic test is because there's one thing I do a lot of while talking on the phone and just do a lot of in general and that's washing my hands. You know I'm just out here trying to be clean, trying to follow that 20 second life. H I J K L M N O P Q R M. You really gotta get under the fingernails. That was something that I always overlook. I hope that this hand washing continues after COVID. I hope that everyone keeps up on it. Oh my hands are gonna be really dry at the end of this test. Everyone's always got a lot of opinions about the mic test and TPH I love this about you guys so I'll see you down there let me know what you thought and what you would use if you could use any of these for just the microphone alone. Which one would you pick? A big feature of these buds though is their integration with Microsoft Office. So in Outlook you can read reply and delete emails and then in PowerPoint you can use your left bud to swipe to the next slide and also play videos. You can also utilize the mic inside of these for live translations in PowerPoint but that is not unique to these buds. Any mic can do that within PowerPoint. Unfortunately though you have to run Windows 10 in order to use these with PowerPoint and in quarantine I don't have a device that runs Windows 10 so I didn't get to make the killer PowerPoint that I wanted to make for you all to test these out with but maybe in the next generation of these because not gonna lie my PowerPoints are incredible. I did find the touch controls to be a bit finicky. Double tap on either bud for play pause and to answer end calls. Tap and hold on either bud to activate a digital assistant and then on the right bud swipe up to turn up the volume and down to turn down the volume and then on the left bud you swipe forward to go to the next track and swipe back for the previous. These controls just weren't really intuitive to me. I wanted to be able to swipe up and down and side to side on both buds and then I also wished it was a single tap for play pause rather than a double tap and then within the app there's no way to customize these controls either so you'll just have to get used to them and lastly when you're swiping on them it's really easy to catch the edge of the bud since it's so far out of your ear and then send it flying out of your ear. Yo but let's talk audio quality. Now these buds have 13.6 millimeter drivers and they sound good. I've been jamming to a whole bunch of summer pop hits that I'm a total sucker for and a lot of Motown and then of course there's always some acoustic stuff in there too and I'll link that playlist down below like I did on the buds review. These can handle all of that and the bass is definitely more there than say on the Pixel buds but overall it just sounds like it's coming from a smaller speaker. It didn't feel as full and there wasn't as much separation in the highs and the lows as I was looking for but within the app there are fully customizable EQ settings which I super appreciate. Because there's no in-ear detection sometimes it starts saying directions to you before you have them in your ears and then you're kind of stuck in this weird limbo of like did you say hello did you say something to me? I guess we'll never know. That lack of in-ear detection also means that when you take your buds out whatever you're listening to won't stop and there's also no active noise cancellation and because of their design they just let a lot of sound through. From the headphones I have available to me it most closely resembles the amount of sound that my wired Apple headphones let through. I really don't think it was Microsoft's intention to block all outside noise with these. I mean if you're giving a presentation and you're using these as your clicker you don't want to be blocking all of the noise around you but if you're using these in an open office or you're on a commute that same quality is much less ideal and I really can't imagine choosing these to fly with. I was really impressed with this Bluetooth connection though. You can use either headphone independently and I never experienced a Bluetooth dropout like I usually do with buds in my Android device and there's no noticeable lag when watching movies or playing games either. The Surface Audio app shows battery life of your buds but not the case and houses device settings along with updates and video tutorials. There's a notification that pops up once you've connected your buds to your phone and you open the app. This notification says that it's helping keep your buds connected to your device but I super hate having notifications so I disabled them for this app on my phone and I didn't experience any problems with my headphones dropping out or EQ settings changing for that matter. Microsoft claims that the Surface earbuds have around 8 hours of continuous listening time on a single charge with two additional charges in the case. A 10 minute quick charge can provide up to one hour of additional battery life. In my test I found that the battery life was really good but when taking a lot of calls with them the battery drained much quicker. And I'm really confused as to why there isn't wireless charging in this case especially for $200 but that's kind of the story of these headphones for me. Since October 2019 a lot of new earbuds have come out. We've seen earbuds from Sony, Samsung, Apple, I mean even Amazon and Google have put out wireless earbuds. So by the time these actually got to market well we've seen a lot of great competition come in. And for $200 while these headphones can definitely compete audio wise they're just missing some features like wireless charging and on top of that these are really big earbuds. So I just feel like Microsoft is coming a little too late to the party with well not enough to offer. Buds buds buds buds buds buds buds buds buds buds buds buds buds buds buds buds buds everybody buds buds buds buds. It's getting it's getting to that level around here. Awesome. treats. Yeah. Awesome.ürger�