Tech Tools review: Plantronics BackBeat Sense

It’s not the much of a surprise that Plantronics has moved into headphones. The company has been doing Bluetooth headsets for a long time and has decided to take the expertise it has built up there and bring it to consumers in a new way.

The BackBeat Sense headphones bring the best of Plantronics’s knowledge and package it in a nice, neat consumer-friendly bundle. The Bluetooth headphones can be used with your phone, tablet or computer, making them a real multitasker.

They’ve been built for comfort. Think soft ear cups with memory foam so they practically mould themselves to your ears. The lightweight stainless-steel band never even touches your head because there’s a rubber band and a soft leatherette strip to cushion it.

On one ear cup you have the power button, which also doubles as the switch to activate Bluetooth pairing. There’s a call button that allows you to pick up phone calls when you are connected wirelessly to your phone, a 3.5mm jack for connecting the headphones to an iPhone compatible cable should your battery run out.

That wasn’t a problem during this test though, because a full charge will get you about 18 hours of continuous use. When you have to charge the battery, it will take about 2½ hours and it uses a micro USB cable, which you’re bound to have hanging around since almost every smartphone – bar the iPhone – uses that particular connection.

The other ear cup has controls for skipping between tracks and raising or lowering volume. It also has a small red button that will activate the built-in microphone. The most obvious use for that is making phone calls, but the mic button has another function: hit it when you are listening to music and it activates the mic so you can hear what’s going on around you.

This has a couple of interesting uses. If you’re travelling, you can hear what flight attendants and people around you are saying, and you don’t accidentally bellow at them in response. But the more fun one is to effectively eavesdrop on people when they think you otherwise distracted or deafened by your headphones. You can pick up some interesting conversations, if you’re of a mind to.

The BackBeat Sense also has an interesting feature in that removing the headphones will pause your audio playback instantly. You don’t even have to hit a button. The sensor appears to be in one ear cup, so once that leaves your ear the music cuts out. It’s a handy little extra; no more fumbling for the pause button when someone starts speaking to you.

The good

The comfort. The BackBeat Sense headphones are really comfortable to wear, even for extended periods of time. They don’t dig into the side of your face, and even though they aren’t noise- cancelling they do a good job of blocking out the background noise.

Speaking of noise, the headphones themselves are decent all-rounders. They handled music, voice notes and podcasts with ease. Music sounds great, even over Bluetooth.

The not so good

The BackBeat Sense don’t fold up, which would be handy for travel. However, the ear cups rotate 180 degrees, so they can be stored more easily.

The rest

For the first hour of using these headphones, I didn’t know which was supposed to go on the left ear and which was intended for the right. Most headphones mark this on the ear cups, although with over-ear headphones it doesn’t make much of a difference. So I took a guess. It was only an hour later that I realised it’s actually punched into the design on the leatherette on the inside of the ear cups. So learn from my mistake.

The BackBeat Sense come with their own storage bag that has two pockets: one for the headphones and one for the cables.

Verdict

HHHH If you are looking for multipurpose headphones that won’t break the bank, these are a good option.