As well as pulling the cloth off its Pixel 10 smartphone lineup, Google has just revealed its latest budget wireless earbuds – and they appear to be proper little smarty pants, the emphasis on ‘little’ and, even more so, ‘smart’.
Indeed, the all-new Pixel Buds 2a, which arrive as the successors to the 2021-released Pixel Buds A‑Series and join the flagship Pixel Buds Pro 2 in Google’s two-strong earbuds lineup, could well be the smartest-ever earbuds available for a price tag as modest as $129.
I haven’t yet seen, let alone heard, the latest Google earbuds – they are almost as fresh into the world as these words and, by the way, aren’t available to buy until October 9th. But their on-paper offering has already raised my eyebrows (I sadly don’t have the facial skills to raise one at a time) and had me muttering, “What’s the catch?”
Allow me to very briefly set the budget wireless earbuds scene for you: there are plenty that cost $129 or less, but few of those have active noise cancellation onboard, fewer deliver a total battery life above 24 hours, and fewer still offer AI features. So the fact that the Pixel Buds 2a boast all of those things, and wrap them up into a compact and seemingly smart, Google-standard aesthetic, is why I will be lining up to try them out.
Unprecedented intelligence
So, noise-canceling technology comes to Google’s A-Series model for the first time, alongside a Transparency mode that allows owners to temporarily easily hear useful sounds (a station platform announcement, say) without having to remove the buds from their ears. That’s a notable one-up on the price-matching AirPods 4.
It’s doubtful that the Pixel Buds 2a will perform the exact same level of sound-blocking tech as their more premium sibling, considering Google names their ANC ‘Silent Seal 1.5’ compared to the Buds Pro 2’s ‘Silent Seal 2.0’, but if they can get even close to the same effectiveness in reducing street noise and office chit-chat, I’d say that’s a boon for the new budget buds.
Google has sensibly tapped into its AI abilities to integrate its Gemini AI assistant, allowing owners of compatible smartphones running the Gemini app to get answers to questions, have emails read out, and conversations translated, for example, through the earbuds. I remember it all working very well in the Pixel Buds A-Series, so four years down the line I’m intrigued to see how far the seamlessness of such conversation-like exchanges has come.
Find Hub, which can pinpoint the precise location of your earbuds on a map if you misplace them, is another smart extra, in a similar vein to Apple’s Find My for its AirPods 4.
Powering all this capability is a Tensor A1 chip (at the heart of the Buds Pro 2 too), which is also partly responsible for the Buds 2a’s generous battery claims of seven hours (in the earbuds) and 20 hours (with the case) with ANC on, and 10 and 27 hours respectively with ANC off. If these purported figures translate to real-world use, that’s another big tick in a box for the Buds 2a.
What about unprecedented performance?
Of course, what’s the point of such durability and feature competence if they don’t perform their core job well: playing music. I was pleasantly surprised by the A-Series’ clear, detailed and somewhat lively sound when I first heard them upon their debut, but the uber-competitive budget wireless earbuds category waits for no one, and Google will certainly need to have bumped up its audio performance here if it’s to compete with today’s $100-$150 Sonys, AirPods and Soundcores in the sound department.
There are promising signs – ‘redesigned acoustics’, a decently sized (11mm) dynamic driver, and even some sort of stereo ‘spatial audio’ effect when partnered with the Pixel Tablet and Pixel 6 and newer phones – so I very much hope they back up their apparent cleverness with audio competitiveness.
Indeed, if Google hasn’t compromised that in order to pack these smart Tensor A1 chip-powered features and their supposedly lightest, smallest A-Series design (with IP54 water resistance!) into a $129 package, we could be a) looking at the most sophisticated and appealing budget earbuds yet – at least for non-Apple device users, and b) wondering how Google will advance all of this for its next pair of Pixel Buds Pro.
