Australian technology news, reviews, and guides to help you
Australian technology news, reviews, and guides to help you

The Wrap – September 8, 2017

All the audio news from Beats, B&O, and Jabra, a guide to noise cancellation, and not quite an iPhone to play the music from. All in minutes. It’s The Wrap.

Transcript

For September 8, you’re listening to The Wrap, Australia’s fastest dose of technology sent straight to your ears.

And this week, sending things to your ears is a fitting way to start the show, because as the German mid-year technology show that is IFA wrapped up, we got to hear about the latest headphones making their way to our ears in the coming months.

Last week on the show, we mentioned how Sony had a few new models coming based on its successful MDR-1000X noise cancelling headphones, and this week we found it wasn’t alone, as a few other companies joined them.

First there was B&O, or Bang & Olufsen as most know them as, and it announced the E8, the first totally unwired earphones for the brand, following in the footsteps of Samsung, of Apple, and Jabra with a pair of totally cordless earphones, with one made for each ear.

We’re told the E8 will offer B&O’s Signature Sound, which means you can expect a warm tonality that you can tweak with the B&O app, but they’ll also be made from aluminium and built for splash and dust resistance, making them ideal for use in the world beyond your traditional walk.

At $449, they’re not necessarily cheap, though for Bang & Olufsen, that pricing isn’t too bad altogether, and the company is known for some decent earphone choices, a few of which we’ve reviewed at the website.

One of the brands expected to compete with the B&O E8 is that of Jabra, and it already kind of does. You’ve been able to find the Jabra Elite Sport totally wireless in-earphones for a few months now, and we gave them a pretty good score back in May, but now they may be even better.

This week Jabra refreshed the model, and it now sports a slightly revamped set of internals boasting a better battery life, and pushing it from a good 8 or 9 hours to nearly 14.

Interestingly, Jabra told us the design isn’t completely the same, and the case from the new pair won’t work on the old, so if you go into a store and you happen to be buying these earphones, do yourself a favour and make sure you’re getting the one that has “Elite Sport 13.5” written on the earphones and the inside of the case lid.

Without it — just the regular Elite Sport — and you’re potentially getting the older model. It’s still good, sure, but you get less battery life. Just something to be aware of.

Finally, Beats by Dre also joined the headphone news with a new pair, as the Apple-owned brand unveiled the Studio3, a new entry in the range that practically started up Beats and helped make it what it is today.

Unsurprisingly, the Beats Studio3 will feature that lowercase “b” on an oversized pair of headphones, but for the first time on an Apple pair of headphone, it will also sport adaptive noise cancellation, and this is something you’re going to see a lot more of in the near future. In essence, there are two major types of noise cancellation out there, and they both work a little differently, with the second type splitting off into two categories of its own.

First there’s passive noise cancellation, and these are almost always earphones that go in your ear, deep in there, quelling the sound passively.

The other major noise cancellation technology is active noise cancellation, and this has primarily been the domain of Bose, of Audio Technica, of Sony and Plantronics and so on, with anyone producing a pair of flight-friendly headphones building a pair of these. They take a sound matched to a frequency and basically reverse it, cancelling out the sound to begin with.

But this matching of a sound type and frequency means they have a bit of a limitation, and will only let you cancel out specific frequencies and sounds, like that of engine noise.

Adaptive noise cancellation is the evolution of this, with headphone makers using advanced algorithms to make headphones that can change their profiles to cancel out other types of noise. You’re not likely to get them cancelling out people’s voices — we have too much variation in our voice, and so that’s unlikely — but cancelling out the background hum of a crowded cafe or a bustling workplace, that’s actually a possibility.

For the Beats Studio3, the technology, you’ll find a handful of proprietary technologies coming together to make this possible, as well as support for no cables because these headphones will be wireless, arriving in October with a retail price of $450.

Now you’re going to want something to play the music from, and good news, because we have a new phone we’ve just reviewed.

Pickr was built for phone tracking, you know, so it shouldn’t surprise you that we have a new phone review ready, and this week it’s Oppo’s R11, another in Oppo’s line of phones that gets very close to doing pretty much everything an iPhone looks like and can do, but for less of the price.

This time, Oppo is looking straight at the iPhone 7 Plus, targeting the big iPhone’s dual cameras and finding a way to make its twelve hundred dollar price tag a touch more appealing.

Instead of a $1200 buck phone, Oppo’s R11 is $649, and yet arrives with the same 5.5 inch screen size, a combination of a 20 megapixel and 16 megapixel rear camera for wide and close, a 20 megapixel front-facing selfie camera, and a body made of metal, glass, plus a fingerprint sensor.

And for the most part, the spec list and feature set actually works well enough, with 4GB RAM offering the eight-core Snapdragon 660 chip enough room to flex its muscle, and Oppo’s version of Android “ColorOS” being well tuned enough, even if it does come across as a direct clone of Apple’s iOS.

In fact, that feeling of it being a direct clone will make it one of those things you’ll either love or hate. Folks who have come from an iPhone will likely dig it because it’s a version of Android that looks and feels identical, and we mean it. If it weren’t for the different apps, good luck telling the difference. On the other hand, if you like Android the way Google makes it, this is not the phone for you, as Android looks more like an iPhone.

Despite this, we didn’t mind the phone, as it offers a decent camera, solid metal build, and up to two days of battery life, something Apple’s own original iPhone 7 Plus can struggle to get. There’s no NFC — meaning no Android Pay support, something Oppo has never sported — and you won’t see water resistance either, but if you can handle life without those, you’ll find a pretty solid phone in Oppo’s R11, and one that’s fairly cost-effective, at that.

And finally before we go, an Australian inventor is on his way to building a critical piece of modern medicinal manufacturing, as he has won the local arm of the 2017 James Dyson Award.

Queensland’s William Mason is the winner of Australian division of the James Dyson Award for making great products that have the potential to help, winning with the Active Infusion Pump, a piece of technology that makes it possible to receive cancer medication from chemotherapy but still go about your regular life. Mason beat out a portable toilet and a way for scuba divers to keep talking to each other, and his invention will now head to the international stage along with those runners up to see whether it can win the international Dyson Award, and we wish all the Aussies the best of luck.

We won’t have an answer for who wins that for a while, though, but the moment we do, you can expect to hear about it on The Wrap.

For now, we’ve run out of time, but we’ll be back next week with more news and a review.

Until then, be sure to have a great week and a lovely weekend, whichever comes first, and we’ll see you next time on The Wrap. Take care.

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