5. GEAR4 BluPhones

The BluPhones are halfway between ear buds and back-of-the-neck headphones, with large round ear-pieces with shaped tips that fit partway into your ear canal and a frame that’s too flexible to call a headband and too rigid to call a cable. This makes them easy to squeeze into a pocket but you don’t get a case to keep them in and you will need to take the proprietary USB power cable if you’re listening for more than a few hours.

The exceptionally flexible construction makes the GEAR4 BluePhones as portable as your MP3 player.

The BluPhones aren’t too heavy, but they’re not the lightest Bluetooth headphones either, especially as the frame presses against the back of your neck rather than resting over your ears. There are two sizes of tip to choose from but they’re both very firm rubber. Getting the right size improves the audio quality and increases the volume significantly. The springy cable passing round your ears restricts the angle at which you can place the ear-pieces but you can rotate the tips instead for a more comfortable fit. You don’t get significant noise reduction just by having the headphones on but the tips fit well in your ears, so it’s possible to pull them off accidentally and leave them in your ears when you take the BluPhones off.

To pair the BluPhones you press and hold the multifunction power button, which also controls play and pause, and answers, ends or rejects phone calls. It takes a little longer than the manual suggests to start pairing so it’s easy to just turn them on instead. Pairing is also more complicated because the BluPhones don’t use the 0000 pass code as every other pair of Bluetooth headphones tested do. The code they use (1234) isn’t any harder to type in on a mobile phone but it takes longer on a media player where you have to scroll through numbers individually.

There’s no way to tell the multifunction button from the forward and back buttons next to it by feel, so you have to remember which way round they are. The same is true of the volume controls on the other earpiece. There’s no audio tone to indicate that you’ve pressed a button but there is very little delay when you switch functions. With the right tips, the audio quality of the BluPhones is good – better than what you would expect from ear buds rather than in-canal earphones. Stereo separation is good too, although not as clear as the best headphones we tested. You’ll hear more bass than with some other headphones although it’s not particularly clear or well defined. Midtones and treble are clear but again not as rich or detailed as they might be.

The range of the BluPhones is extremely good. You can get further away from your phone or media player than with any of the other headphones and music plays clearly through even thick brick walls. The audio quality of phone calls is generally good, as is the noise reduction, but voices on both ends of the call occasionally sound muffled. The BluPhones don’t have as many phone features as some Bluetooth headphones and the audio quality isn’t the best you can get, but they’re lightweight and well priced – and the unusual style combines the best features of several other designs.