Mobvoi, the company behind the Google Assistant powered Tichome Mini and Wear OS powered Ticwatch E and S are now trying their hands at truly wireless earbuds, launching their TicPods Free wireless earphones on IndieGoGo this morning.
This isn’t the first time the company has gone down the crowd-funding route for their products, with the Ticwatch E and S launched on Kickstarter. The Ticpods Free are truly wireless, and come with a charging case to store them in when not in use. That charging case will charge your Ticpods Free up to 18 hours, the buds themselves have a 4 hour life with the charging case giving you another 14.
There’s no buttons on the Tipods Free, but they do support gesture controls with swipe up/down for volume control, while a double tap can skip a song or accept a phone call – a long press while the phone is ringing will reject a call, or if not it will call your phones virtual assistant, be it Google Assistant, Alexa, Siri or whatever you have set as the default.
The Ticpods Free come in three colour options – Red, White and Blue – and contain drivers capable of 95dB sound pressure level (SPL) drivers. Mobvoi says the Ticpods Free have in-ear detection allowing you to control them by simply removing one from your ear to pause a track, or put it back in to resume. The Ticpods Free also support passive noise cancellation, with two different sized silicon eartips included in the box to help that along.
Mobvoi have a pretty good history with their crowd-funding campaigns, they’ve so far raised $293,774 USD from 3056 backers, which is 588% of their $50,000 goal. Mobvoi plan to start shipping the Ticpods Free in July, and there’s a range of perk levels you can back the IndieGoGo campaign at, starting at $79USD for your choice in any colour, but if you want you can pair it with a Tichome Mini speaker, or Ticwatch S or E smartwatch. You can check out all the perk levels over on their IndieGoGo page now.
I’d be interested in these as I’m pretty happy with my Ticwatch E. Although I’d want the know if these sounded good or not….
I was unimpressed with my Ticwatch S, more so because I came from a smartwatch ecosystem that prioritised battery life and still managed a functional product (pebble) and the idea of daily charges did not appeal to me whatsoever. However the physical aspect of the product itself wasn’t too bad.
However, their TicHome mini speaker was definitely a big tick for me. In my house with my non-nbn connection, it responds much faster consistently than my Google Home/Google Home Mini, has great battery life and sounds pretty decent from what I expected.