New Gadgets

I didn’t realize I had a Gadgets category on this blog. Funny I forgot about it, considering I had blogged just a few months back about my new Kindles. 

Anyhoo. Two more gadget updates in case anyone’s interested. 

I bought a new phone for myself. The OnePlus 3T. 128GB/ Gunmetal version. Lovely phone! 

And I bought a new pair of headphones. The noise-canceling Bluetooth sort of headphones. :) Got myself a Sennheiser PXC 550 – which sounds so formal and uncool, but it’s a good pair of headphones nevertheless. It would be in the same category as the Bose QC 35 or the Sony MDX-1000X. I haven’t used either of them but I went with the Sennheiser as it had way more features than either of those, and I was able to get it at the same price point (well, slightly cheaper actually) as the Sony MDX-1000X (which is what I was eyeing, until I came across the PSX 550). 

Cool features of the Sennheiser PXC500 in a nutshell:

  1. It comes with a wired cable with a mic, so even if you run out of battery you can use the headset with no compromises (most other Bluetooth headsets that come with a cable don’t include a mic).
  2. It has a great battery life (30 hours or something, I think; I dunno, I just charge it every weekend or so).
  3. I like the touch controls – lets me easily pause, rewind, forward via a touch on the right ear cup.
  4. The headphones have an inbuilt DSP for modes like speech (useful for podcasts & audio books), movies (useful for movies or listening to film scores), club (I never use this), or none.
  5. Using the companion Android & iOS app you can create custom equalizer settings (I don’t use this) and also enable a cool feature that automatically pauses the music when you take off the headphones (but I turned it off since I discovered that I use the headphones a lot when walking, and the sweat that accumulates seems to confuse these sensors and they randomly pause the music). 
  6. There’s no off/ on button. Simply take off headphones and fold them flat (which is what I always do) and it powers them off! So nice. Unfold and they power on. 
  7. It can connect to 2 devices at the same time. Sooo convenient! It can remember up to 8 (or is it 10) devices – but it only connects automatically to the last 2. 
  8. You can turn off the noise-cancelling or set a percentage for it (which you set via the app). So it doesn’t have to be full noise-cancelling always. Personally, I don’t find any difference between full and a percentage. Which makes me wonder if it’s doing a proper noise-cancelling or not, but I know it blocks out most noise so it’s doing something. One thing I learn about “noise cancelling” is that it doesn’t not entirely cancel noise as the ads might have you believe. You can still hear train announcements and a bit of the background noise – so it’s not totally silent! 
  9. When there’s no music playing you can double tap the right ear cup to turn on a mode that pulls in the surrounding noise via the mics into your ears. So you can hear even more clearly what’s on your surroundings – say you want to talk to someone and don’t want to take off the headphones (and because they are around the ear they still block out noise even if noise cancelling is off). This mode’s useful for that. 

That’s all I think!