company Baseus has been building itself for years as a name synonymous with quality mobile accessories at affordable prices. Its new TWS headphones offer a set of features we’re used to seeing from models that cost 3 or 4 times as much. The question is whether the performance is also impressive? All the answers are inside.
Those who know me know that I am a freak of cheap products. Nothing makes me happier than a product that offers great value for money. So, once I got a chance to review TWS headphones that offer active noise cancellation, fast charging and an app at a consumer price of 150 shekelsI immediately said yes.
In terms of design, the Bowie M2 don’t really bring any news and if you ignore for a moment the small orange ring that adorns the inside of the silicon adapters (which come in three sizes), you can be confused for a moment and think that these are Apple’s AirPods Pro. This is not necessarily a bad thing, the AirPods are beautiful headphones and so are the Baseus, whose plastic finish is relatively impressive and does not feel particularly cheap. The charging case, on the other hand, looks like a cheap and slightly enlarged version of the AirPods Pro case, but to its credit the build quality is good overall.
The AirPods Pro-like design means that the headphones are comfortable and also sit firmly in the ear. Although I found myself tightening their grip on my ear from time to time during the walks I take every evening, but with a frequency that is average for most of the headphones I review.
At these price levels there are very few headphones that come with an app, but Baseus not only offers such an app, it does it very well. In the application, you can switch between the different noise filtering modes (we’ll get to them later), between 12 different equalizer modes (in addition to the possibility to build a personal EQ mode) and also set the activation gestures of the headphones. Although there is no possibility to control the volume through gestures, you can do everything else and at this price, we can’t complain. By the way, the gestures work great and in very rare cases it happened to me that I missed clicks. In addition, you can update a version in the application and I was indeed able to update such a version while I had the headphones.
The active noise filtering works fine, nothing more, but it definitely manages to filter out a little of the noise that surrounds you while using it. I wouldn’t recommend the M2 to those for whom noise filtering is a main feature in the headphones they purchase, but for those who occasionally want to eliminate a little of the surrounding noise, they will do the job. In the application you can choose between several noise filtering modes – outside, inside and driving mode – and you can also set a personal noise filtering level on a scale ranging from 1 to 10. I can’t testify that I felt a huge change between the different modes, but you definitely feel small differences between them. The transparency mode works not bad at all and allows outside noises to enter, but it comes at the expense of the sound.
The sound of the Bowie M2 is not bad at all and definitely better than what I expected to get from NIS 150 headphones. It is not the cleanest and most noticeable sound as the emphasis is on the edges – the treble and the bass – when the immediate (middle) sounds get a little lost and still the sound is pleasant and the intensity is good. Unfortunately, as I wrote before, I discovered that in order for the sound to sound good, you must have the noise filtering mode activated because in the off mode or in the transparency mode, the sound becomes hollow and the bass intensity decreases. Despite this, as soon as you turn on noise filtering, the sound is really surprising for the better, and although it is not a sound that will satisfy audiophiles, it will definitely be enough for the normal user. Another issue that is important to emphasize is the selection of the correct silicon adapter. I found that once I changed the adapter to the one that fit my ear best, the sound improved significantly.
The quality of phone calls is surprisingly good, this is usually the Achilles heel of the cheap headphones, but from the few conversations I had with them, I received positive responses when they heard me perfectly, even when there was a lot of noise around me. On a walk in the evening full of wind, there were complaints about not being able to hear me well, but there are quite a few headphones that are much more expensive than these and do not know how to deal with such winds during a call.
Battery life is reasonable, with an average of about 5 hours of use between charges. The headphones also support fast charging, which gives up to two hours of additional use from a 10-minute charge. What’s not here is wireless charging, but we can’t really demand that at this price.
Summary
Relative to the price, Baseus offer great headphones here. They look good, are comfortable, sound not bad at all and offer a rare set of features for the price they are sold at. In addition to all this they have a great app. Although the sound will not satisfy the fanatical sound lovers, the noise filtering is not the most effective, the design is not really original and it is a shame that you cannot lower or increase the volume using the gestures, but For NIS 150 you get a very good package here.
we loved
- Excellent app
- comfort
- Touch gestures work well
- Good sound for the price
We liked less
- Noise filtering is not very effective
- There is no volume control