Kitsound Trail Bluetooth earbuds

Well these were a bit of a surprise.

I have been eyeing up various Bluetooth headphones for a while. That’s partly because I destroy headphones at a terrible pace (like every other part of me, my ears sweat buckets, and even supposedly waterproof sports headphones dissolve in the tide of powerful perspiration – it’s a real bind. Also, I worry if I have a phone holster when I’m out running that if it rains, my multi-hundred dollar computer will be destroyed. A set of cheap Bluetooth headphones and a smartphone inside a sealed sandwich bag seems like the cheapest (semi) waterproofed solution.

While I was in the UK over the Christmas break, I spotted these headphones for only twenty pounds, looking sad and lonely on a shelf in Sainsbury’s. I vacillated over buying them for some time, but then took the plunge, rationalising that for twenty pounds you couldn’t really go wrong.

When I got them out of their box, I was instantly disappointed. I don’t like purely ear-bud type headphones for running, because I find the bouncing up and down of my head leads to strange noises as the cable gets jostled around, and that’s really distracting. If the ear buds can be modified to get over-the-ear clips, the problem is alleviated, but these particular earbuds were without any such thing. Worse, looking at them, two humongous (comparatively speaking) triangular lumps of plastic were sure to fall out of my ears at the first opportunity.

I only got the chance to try them out today, a couple of weeks after purchasing them. It turns out that my worries were unjustified. I suppose because there’s no headphone cord leading back to my music player, there’s nothing to be jostled (the two earbuds are connected by a wire, but it’s small and doesn’t make any odds here). Further, even in the absence of clips, the earbuds stayed safe and secure in my ears. There was a little bit of wind noise when I started out my run, but there’s been a right gale blowing today round here – as I got further into the trail, the noise abated and I could concentrate on listening to the 80s-inflected sounds of Carly Rae Jepsen’s second album.

Set up of the earbuds was as simple as simple could be – none of the nightmares of Bluetooth pairing that there used to be back in the day (wasn’t 2000 glamourous, kids?) and the sound, if a little tiny, was absolutely fine for a jog – where you want the sound to be a slight distraction from the world, rather than something that robs you of all your concentration as you marvel at the subsonic bass frequencies and a cement mixer runs over you.

If you don’t like running with music, don’t buy these. If you do, and you have a Bluetooth equipped mp3 player (pretty much any phone from this decade, right?) then they’re lovely. Or good enough, which is enough for me.

I’ll report back, as and when they drown in the saline solution my body pumps out.