These are not your regular premium earbuds. They are specialized for sleeping. Because of that, there are many design tradeoffs that were made to optimize for sleeping usage. If you are looking for just a good pair of earbuds, there are many options out there with ANC/transparency, wireless charging, good microphones, multipoint connection, voice assistance etc etc, that will easily outperform these buds at this price point. Generally speaking, these buds will be suited for people who already have a good pair of headphones and want to optimize sleeping usage with another pair.
Unlike the popular sleep buds from Bose, these do provide bluetooth functionality to allow using these as a regular pair of earbuds. I appreciate the ability to put on these buds right before beds for some music and video without having to switch earbuds right before falling asleep.
Comfort and fit is probably the most important thing for buds like these. The buds came with 4 pairs of ear tips and 3 styles of hooks. For my small ears, I find the fit to be ok and not great. With the smallest ear tips as well as the default hook, I needed to push pretty hard on the ear tips to wear the buds. There is some ear fatigue for me after wearing silicone ear tips for the entire night. I find myself needing to catch a break wearing earbuds during the day if I wear these at night.
The tiny earbud body is a clear tradeoff call made for sleep usage. The driver is small so the sound is really just ok. I’d say the sound is tiny compared to other popular premium buds (including Soundcore) in this price range. Not a big surprise. It does make the earbuds themselves very small and flat. Soundcore advertises that these buds make you forget you are wearing them when you are sleeping on your side. I think they are great, but I can definitely still easily feel them. However, I would agree these buds are a great step up from the smallest regular earbuds (e.g. Soundcore A40, or Galaxy Buds plus) for side sleeping comfort. 3 out of the 5 nights I wore them, I woke up with one or two buds falling out of my ears. I’d say that’s actually good results since when using regular earbuds or ear plugs, they usually fall out 100% of the time for me.
The noise isolation and masking is effective for me. I am not quite certain it is significantly better than a regular pair of earplugs yet, but I am starting to appreciate some of the software features. I do like the sleep sounds and intelligent sound management, and I found myself falling asleep faster than usual. I can remember the buds automatically turned on the sleep sounds a few times when my room got a bit noisy, and I was able to drift back to sleep again. I was getting better sleep early in the morning when my family and neighborhood got busy.
The sleep tracking feature works, but not as good as your dedicated fitness tracker. I wore a fitbit every night to sleep (which is known for its good sleep tracking capability), and the deep sleep and overall sleep time very roughly match. I would say if you have a fitness tracker, you probably would not care about this feature from the earbuds as a good fitness tracker generally can monitor a lot more things and monitor them better.
I ran into a repeated issue using these buds. Every night when I put them on and switched to music mode, the right earbud always failed to connect for some reason. I had to put both buds in the case and take them back out to get them both to connect.
Overall, I think these are very interesting and can help some demographic out there. I hesitate to recommend it to everyone at this price point. It is a nice attempt from Anker. I can see if comfort and functionalities further improve, products in this class can become a general consumer product in the future. For now, you could be an early adopter to get these, or stick with regular earbuds or earplugs.