Wireless audio company Bragi has today announced a new pair of Bluetooth earbuds simply called the "Headphone". Based on the firm's original crowdfunded Dash earpieces, the Headphone buds boast the same overall design, but lose some features in favor of a more affordable price tag.
According to Bragi, the main physical difference is the Headphone's three physical buttons, which replace the touch controls found on the Dash for controlling playback, audio transparency, volume, and taking calls.
The activity tracking features native to the $300 Dash buds are also missing in the new earpieces, but their removal shores up battery life on the Headphone, with Bragi promising up to six hours of operation on a single charge, rather than the three hours Dash users will be accustomed to. Bragi also claims the Headphone buds feature a stronger Bluetooth connection than the Dash.
The Bragi Headphone buds are poised to launch in November and will cost $150, with pre-orders starting today at the lower price of $119.
In addition to the new earpieces, Bragi today announced a firmware update to the original Dash buds which the company says improves the accuracy of the devices' heart-rate tracking, while also bolstering the strength of the Bluetooth connection.
With Apple's event just days away, Bragi is unlikely to be the last accessory firm to announce wireless products this week, as the industry shifts gears in anticipation of a new iPhone widely believed to lack a headphone jack.
Apple will provide a live stream of the September 7 keynote on the Apple TV and on iOS and Mac devices through its website. MacRumors will be providing live coverage of the event for those unable to watch, both on MacRumors.com and through the @MacRumorsLive account on Twitter.
Read: What to Expect From Apple's September 7 Event
Top Rated Comments
When people stop whining about headphone jacks, because every Android OEM will remove them, and everyone has bought bluetooth headphones.
I'm guessing you're using the word "radiation" in regards to Bluetooth because it makes it sound more ominous (because nobody calls it that in normal conversation). But radiation is not inherently unsafe. You are exposed to electromagnetic radiation every day. You get a huge dose every time you walk outside during the day - there's an absolutely terrifying source of ultraviolet radiation out there that's so strong that it can literally burn you, from 93 million miles away. But if I call it "The Sun", suddenly it doesn't seem so scary, because it's familiar. Don't let fear of the unknown control your life. Electromagnetic radiation ('https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electromagnetic_radiation') isn't a thing to fear, it is a thing to understand - it's all around us, and always has been. It is characterized by its frequency, or wavelength, and how energetic it is. Danger to life is entirely dependent on those two characteristics combined with exposure time. In more specific frequency ranges, electromagnetic radiation has more common names: gamma rays, X-rays, microwaves, ultraviolet radiation, infrared radiation, and visible light (yep, "light" is just a specific type of radiation - all those light bulbs in your house are irradiating you, but when it's visible light, we normally say they're shining on you). Can you kill lab rats with 2.4GHz radiation in sufficient quantities? Yes. But you can also kill them with water, or oxygen, in sufficient quantities, so what does that prove? Mostly that lab rats are not immortal.
Folks like to "put scientists on the spot" by insisting that they VERIFY that something "carries ABSOLUTELY NO RISK", and then, when the scientists won't unequivocally say, "yes!", these folk say, "Aha! Gotcha! You've just admitted that such and such IS dangerous!" But the simple truth is, good scientists won't say that anything is absolutely positively without risk, because EVERYTHING carries risk. Walking across your living room has a level of risk. Blinking carries risk. It's all a matter of understanding the actual levels of risk in everything you do and deciding which risks to accept in order to receive the corresponding benefits. And you do many things every day that are orders of magnitude more risky than wearing a Bluetooth headset. Starting with driving to work.
(Sorry, I'm just sick and tired of so many people treating radiation as some kind of magical bogeyman out to get them, while having absolutely no freaking idea what it is.)