Touch controls…a 7.1?

More like a 2.0!

I get these (and the review) are a few years old but I recently picked up a refurb pair for a very good price direct from JBL ($30 USD). For that price they’re fantastic and you can only complain so much. The fit, comfort, SQ (fairly typical/expected JBL sound), all those things are quite good IMO and reflected in the review here. But the controls? Ugh.

It would be quite amiss for me to not mention somewhere online….just how woefully bad the touch controls are on these. The controls are so bad it’s nearly unbelievable! I have some other TWS buds with touch controls (a pair of Soundstream/Havit ones, nothing special) and I thought the touch controls on those were kind of marginal at best. But these JBLs are like in a whole other dimension of bad. It’s great you can customise some of the controls in the app–some functions are greyed out and can’t be changed so I assume that means it can be on other models but not these. But the actual controls themselves, I dunno if it’s just my pair but the controls are absolutely atrocious. Given it’s the same on both the left and right side I don’t think it’s a matter of them being defective in some way. I think that’s just how they are.

Swiping…lol swiping. 90% of the time swiping just does the same thing as a single tap (i.e. play/pause). So basically you set and try to change the volume with swiping and you can swipe at every different angle, every different pressure, every different speed you can possibly think it’s “looking for” to determine a swipe annnnd NOPE! It will just register it as a tap! 🙄 So yeah forget about swiping, period. If you want to change the volume, do so on your phone, otherwise be prepared to just be pausing/unpausing instead.

Then even tapping is poor. A lot of times it doesn’t even register a tap and then you can start tapping like mad while it does nothing, and then sometimes because you get so frustrated tapping it ends up registering your tap as a “long press” and brings up your phone assistant or whatever instead of doing play/pause. Finally, sometimes it registers the tap (it beeps) but the phone does nothing? I’m not sure if that’s an issue on the phone end or what but yeah it’s another reason there’s no point in using the touch controls.

Only other thing to say is the battery life seems pretty poor too, esp. using outside as you’ll likely have the volume up a good ways (it seems like you have to be at around 75% volume when outdoors which is more than say my of non-TWS JBL Reflect Mini2s). About an hour of use and I’m down to 60% battery so I don’t expect you’d see more than about 2-2.5 hrs out of them in an outdoor situation.

Again at the price I paid the battery life is a minor nitpick, and the touch controls are just a matter of pretending they don’t exist and not using them. Had I paid full original retail price for these when they were a new model…man I’d be quite disappointed.

Hey thanks for the reply!

I’ve actually tried a few more of these things since posting and the truth is they are all pretty darn poor when it comes to sound quality. They’re so bad I’m looking into my next option of just building my own and having the power source be a tool battery. I’ve seen some other ppl do this online and am starting to get some ideas on what to do for my own. The jobsite speakers, they all have a similar sound profile–harsh. I understand they should be loud (and they do get relatively loud for a given size) but there’s also a lot of BT speakers that get loud and don’t sound so poor.

I think the real problem is the lack of reviews from an audio perspective just lets the tool companies keep on truckin’ with putting out what would have been acceptable in a 1989 clock radio, lol. In other words there’s no one to “keep them honest” as it were. I also started looking more carefully at the more critical user reviews and the same thing comes up in those. However it’s only a minority of people that mention this. When “everyone gives it 5 stars” because it turns on and works, that’s basically just telling the tool companies that everyone is happy. Which I suppose most might be but it’s a bit frustrating at the prices they charge for these things.

Not sure how that problem gets solved apart from audio reviews that can highlight this for people (and the tool companies). I don’t really have any particular model to suggest but if you guys ever get the chance to review any one of them in a similar class to say Charge and Megaboom, please do! It’d be interesting to see the results. To me they pretty much all sound the same (bad) so just reviewing one and having comparative data, will tell the story. While I can’t say what you’d find and how it’d do in all your ratings categories, I’m pretty sure it’s going to come out with the “jobsite speaker” doing very poorly on things related to sound…apart from maximum dB.