Last year, Motorola joined the fully wireless headphone revolution with a new line of products under the VerveLife banner. The company is expanding its tangle-free listening options with a new entry-level version of its VerveOnes Bluetooth earbuds, dubbed the Music Edition. The buds are on sale now.
Compared to the standard VerveOnes and range-topping VerveOnes+, the Music Edition offers the distinction of a white design, while providing many of the same features found in the other two models. That includes a charging case, compatibility with Siri and Google Now, and support for location tracking via Motorola’s Hubble Connect app for when you misplace your earbuds. All VerveOnes also support audio pass-through, which is useful for hearing the world around you when bicycling or running.
The difference is, the Music Edition comes in at $150 — $50 less than the mid-range VerveOnes, and a full $100 less than the VerveOnes+. To hit the price point, Binatone, which manufactures VerveLife products for Motorola, appears to have scrubbed a few key features found in its more expensive offerings.
The Music Edition boasts only eight hours of playback time total — which includes recharging the buds via the charging case. The higher-end variants offer 12 hours in total, but again, you’ll need to recharge the ‘buds via the case to get to that number. That likely puts the Music Edition somewhere around two hours of playback time per charge, before you’ll need to take a break and put them back in the case, though Motorola hasn’t disclosed that information at this point. In addition, the Music Edition also lack dual microphones, which aid in call clarity.
However, it sports some advantages as well. The Music Edition is the only product in the VerveOnes line with up to 100 feet of range — the others are capped at 33 feet. It also claims IP54 water and dust resistance, indicating protection against splashes from any direction. While this makes it less ideal for fitness-minded customers than the IP57-rated VerveOnes+, which are designed to survive sweat or the occasional drop in a puddle, it is more than you get in the standard $200 version.
Right now, the cost of even low-end wireless buds is still prohibitively high for many potential customers. As more companies have jumped on the bandwagon and competition has increased, prices have fallen. Although Motorola’s newest contender may still be asking too much for the vast majority of users who are perfectly content with their packed-in EarPods, these buds are relatively inexpensive in their class, and that’s good news for the burgeoning market in the long term.
