Jabra’s new revision of the Elite Sport changes only one thing: the battery life. But that’s more useful than it sounds, because it was one of my only complaints about the original.
There’s only one difference, really, between the $349 updated Elite Sport and the original which I loved earlier this year. The updated Elite Sport, which you can already buy now, have another 90 minutes of listening time. 4.5 hours of listening time from the earbuds is heaps, putting the new models up there with the best of the best in terms of battery longevity.
Three hours’ listening from the original was enough for me to get through a weekend bike ride, or a protracted session at the gym. What it wasn’t enough for was the trip to or from the gym, or the bike ride back from wherever I ended up heading out to. It’s kinda like the difference between a phone you need to charge in the afternoon before you go out, and a phone you can just charge overnight once you’re home. 4.5 hours is enough for basically anything I could want, and means I’ve been using these wireless earbuds even more than the first version.
The updated Elite Sports also face some newly tough competition from the Bose SoundSport Free, though, as well as the B&O Play E8s and Sony’s noise-cancelling WF-1000X. At $329 they’re the cheapest of this lot, but also more expensive than the $229 AirPods.
They’re still, for my money, the best compromise of sound quality and battery life and price and extra features — like heart rate monitoring — that you can buy. I’m a big fan. But we’ll see how the B&O and Sony earbuds stack up in my weeks of listening to come… [Jabra]
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