It’s a familiar story: somewhere on the way to the party, you lost a headset. Meanwhile, in another location, a similar story of distress: your friend has just left his phone in the taxi and now he can’t tell you that.
Trek 2000 (yes, the company best remembered for inventing the ThumbDrive) wants to save your night with its first foray into true wireless headphones, Re-YTHM.
No, we don’t know how you should say that name (Reethum? Re-Whythum?), but we do know that Trek’s Re-YTHM headphones have new enhanced ‘Drop and Alert’ and ‘Proximity Alert’ recovery systems that, when used together, should help us to minimize the loss of our headphones and the source devices they are paired with.
What do resources do? Well, it’s something that not even the best wireless headphones on the market have offered so far. Currently awaiting completion of patent filings, Drop Alert uses a voice activation notification via the earphones when a user drops one of their earphones and deploys bright, flashing LED lights from the missing earphone to assist you to locate it (on a darker street, say, or if it just fell over the side of the couch).
Proximity Alert, meanwhile, will issue an ‘out of range’ voice notification through the headphones if the mobile devices connected to the buds are a short distance apart – that is. if your phone is still on Uber you just left. With a range of up to 30 meters, the visual and audio assistance of this enhanced recovery feature (which uses Bluetooth Low Energy or Bluetooth LE protocol) should significantly help users avoid losing their devices like this your headphones.
Opinion: These recovery features are music to my easily distracted ears – and I hope Apple is listening
Apple’s Find My asset tracking app, which will locate and play a sound on a supported iPhone, iPad, iPod touch, Mac, Apple Watch, AirPods or Beats headphones is well documented and admittedly pretty good – but if you don’t activate Find My before is lost, forget it.
Also, if you want to see how far your devices are from you, make sure you turn on Accurate Location for the Find My app, which you can’t always share.
What Trek is offering here is something more urgent and more useful in the short term. I can’t count all the awkward moments in life that I would be able to retrieve if my lost headset would simply flash bright lights for me to quickly locate it. But here’s one: During the 2021 Mercury Awards gala, I came out from under our prominent press table brandishing my errant headset and yelling ‘Woohoo!’ just like Mogwai passed. I had missed their music. I can never change that.
You could argue that you know when your headphones are too far from your phone, because the music just stops playing. But how often have you experienced Bluetooth failures completely unrelated to your device’s geographic distance – dead batteries, pairing with a last known device, and the like? If a really useful voice said for me the problem was the location of my iPhone, well that could be a game changer.
Anyway, elsewhere, the Re-YTHM headphones support dual-mode Bluetooth 5.2 (for near-instant device pairing and a rock-solid connection) and three distinct listening modes, including an active noise-cancelling mode and profile. of transparency.
Each bud is also relatively light at 6g (although check out Sony’s LinkBuds S if you need small units) and the IPX5 water resistance rating means they should be good for even the sweatiest spin classes.
The Re-YTHM also features 8 hours of continuous music playback and 9 hours of talk time on a single charge, and the wireless charging case can charge from flat to full in just 1.5 hours to add another 28 hours of music playback. music and 31.5 hours of chat time.
All that, and they’re just $59.90 (about £49 or AU$86). Interesting, especially when even the cheapest Apple AirPods (2019) cost more than twice as much and as such are doubly painful to lose…