Jabra Elite 65t Ear Buds - Live With It (Patreon)

Sarah reports in on her three months living with the Jabra Elite 65t ear buds. 

Jabra Elite 65t Alexa Enabled True Wireless Earbuds with Charging Case  – Titanium Black 

$169. on Amazon

3.5/5 stars, 1760 customer reviews

$119 “renewed” which Amazon says works and looks like new

4 stars, 170 customer reviews

$169 on Jabra’s website, free shipping, 30-day returns.

Colors: titanium black, copper black (Best Buy exclusive), or gold beige 

2-year warranty against damage from water and dust if you register with the Jabra Sound+ app 

OTHER MODELS:

Elite 65t Active - $189, has integrated motion sensor to track workouts, etc

Elite Sport - $219, has its own fitness app, Jabra Sport Life, and an in-ear heart rate monitor and personalized audio coaching in real-time during your workout.

Evolve 65t - $329 - has bluetooth adapter to use with your computer 

INITIAL THOUGHTS:

• App immediately had a firmware update to install, didn’t give details on what was getting upgraded, 2/16/2019
• The app is awesome, easy to navigate, has different modes for walking vs commuting vs needing “white noise” or equivalent, has bass boost options
• intentionally tried to use them out of the box without reading manual to test intuitiveness. left vs right buttons for volume control, skipping a song, stopping audio, answering a phone call, engaging Siri were not intuitive until I read the manual. Easy afterward. 
• Depending on what’s in your hands on the go, having left and right controls can be a pain
• Would prefer them in gold beige, my iPhone is gold, would blend in better to my ears, same price
• Left side seems to want to fall out more easily, maybe because it’s all the volume and skipping I’m doing, maybe just weird ears
• Overall sound is exceptional

NITPICKY STUFF:

• Charging case is hard to open, earbuds aren’t snug in the case, a couple times one or both have flown out when I open it
• Occasionally when I put em in my ears, only the right side audio works. 
• Have had to re-pair with my phone’s bluetooth a couple times which requires turning off bluetooth on the phone and sometimes it takes a while to connect again. Super annoying when I’m about to go on a walk, etc.
• When snugly in ears, pressing either side’s button feels like I’m cramming them in more, doesn’t hurt but slightly awkward

HALFWAY IN:

• I’ve gotten used to gingerly opening the case, not a problem anymore, although both sides look the same and I’m always accidentally trying to open the wrong side
• Battery life is exceptional. When they go back in the case, it shows me a green light, yellow light, or red light. I only got to the red light once just to see how long it took.
• The case is really important to keep near me at all times, not a huge issue but a couple times I thought I lost it in a purse
• App is really the killer feature of these earbuds. 
• I really like the feature where I can choose to “uncancel” the noise-cancelling feature from “HearThrough” in the app settings when nothing is playing so I can hear the world around me better. Makes a big difference. There’s also a slider so you can decide how much HearThrough you want. I have my level up full. 
• The app will auto-pause any audio when you remove one earbud from your ear, then resume playing when you put it back in under 60 seconds. You can turn off this feature if you want.
• On a phone call, you can choose to hear your own voice, which I love. Again there’s a level slider. Mine is about halfway up.
• When someone calls, you can toggle on/off Jabra’s Siri-like voice announcing the name (or if there’s no contact, the number) of person calling, It’s pretty slow but it’s voice activated so you can say something like “decline” without touching your ears
• It’s Siri or Alexa-enabled which you can choose within the app. It was connected to Siri by default since I’m on an iPhone but connecting to Alexa was easy. I switched back to Siri eventually.
• Took a while to get the hang of the audio cues to wake the assistant. One tone, pause. Two tones, assistant. But if you keep holding down the button the earbuds turn off. I turned them off by accident at least 20 times before I got good at it. 
• On a windy day, wind noise is definitely a factor 
• Sound quality remains great 
• I’ve gotten used to the somewhat bulkiness in my ears, my fit issues solved themselves once I got the hang of the “insert/twist” method but I have to make sure they’re snug
• Thanks to some folks in our DTNS community, I now just put one of the earbuds back in the case when Bluetooth fails or I don’t get stereo bluenbtooh, only happened once in the last month but that solved it. 

FINAL THOUGHTS:

• Even for the price, these are great earbuds. I can’t imagine going back to anything wired, especially iPhone earbuds. 
• You really have to be meticulous about where you take your earbuds out and where the case is. Even if they don’t need a charge, they really have to stay together
• If you are ok with the “renewed” version, $119 is much more competitive 
• I didn’t end up using the app much, great for setting up initial custom stuff but once I had everything set I didn’t really need it. Chose to have firmware update notifications turned on, never got one
• Several people asked me about them when I was wearing them in public. Seems like there are a lot of folks who like the idea of wireless earbuds but haven’t pulled the trigger. If you can afford to spend a little more I recommend.

FIN