Why

My previous noname TWS earbuds from AliExpress are dead after five years of usage (a different story) so I had to find the new ones.

After brief Amazon check I found thesoundcore P31iin the "Best sellers list". So I just ordered it as a replacement.

What

After a week of usage I can say that it definitely worth its price.

Price

This time I payed for it ~¥5000 (~$30) and I did expect it to connect to my phone and be capable of playing sound which it indeed does.

Sound

Of course you can't listen to music as you can't in any earbuds: almost no bass (despite the equalizer), weird treble, no isolation, tiny dynamic range (given you don't have silence outside), basically the same quality as in AirPods, I tried to use before.

Anyway, it works perfectly for podcasts, videos, games, learning apps (I use it for playing me Japanese phrases right now).

Features

It has an app (with AI of course!) that is ~600 MiB for iPhone and can configure controls and modes.

Controls are touches and series of touches, right and left device are distinguished, long and short touches are separate actions, so nothing to blame here.

Also there's equalizer, sound limiters and some other basic features.

Of course there's an AI tool but I didn't accept the license agreement so can say nothing about it. The ad says about translations and some unique™ features© that no one have seen before.

ANC

ANC works unexpectedly well. I didn't expect that it's possible in earbuds (at least in AirPods Pro it does not work at all for me) but here it's capable of reducing external noises quite a bit! It required a test in the app to configure, but then it makes it possible to listen to podcast even standing on railway station with all the announcements.

Usability

The standard box has several sets of gum fillers, as usual, none of them fits my ear, but the biggest one at least does not fall out immediately. If you can use other devices, you'll be able to use this one, I suppose.

Touch control works just fine, I expected less from the thirty-bucks-device, it correctly splits short and long touches and multi-taps.

Turns on fast, Bluetooth connects almost immediately (at least with iPhone), the battery lasts for a… Well… It was a one week so I didn't spend the whole charge yet.

The box with charger is rather small and fits almost any pocket I can imagine.

I guess, the difference between the left and right device will be noticeable in a year or two, so now it's not reasonable to estimate the battery life.

Overall

For now it's a perfect deal and the device will serve me for next five years or so, I guess.

The only problem: app is too fat. I don't think anyone will use these speech recognition features and other things like that, so at the very least I'd expect the minimal app.

But anyway this is 4.5/5 overall, 0.5 down for the huge app.