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Bose Sleepbuds II Review – they didn’t work | 2021

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Bose Sleepbuds II Review | 2021

I had hoped to share with you a glowing and detailed review of the Bose Sleepbuds II, reality intervened. After the battery disaster that was v1 (link to Bose.com), Bose has solved those issues for this Gen II product and, instead, introduced the ‘inability to pair feature‘. From my experience these Sleepbuds were useless.

 

 

Bose Sleepbuds II Review
  • Price - 5%
    5%
  • Apparent Accuracy - 5%
    5%
  • Build Quality & Design - 85%
    85%
  • Features, Including App - 80%
    80%
44%

Summary

Other reviews of the Bose Sleepbuds II are reasonably positive, yet I was intrigued by Tom’s Guide who found the Sleepbuds II hard to sleep with. I would tend to disagree with Tom and I found the Sleepbuds II comfortable to wear, the discrepancy probably comes down to our individual ear morphology.

The sleepbuds work in two ways firstly they have “passive noise isolation” which is a fancy way of saying the physically block sounds getting to your ear. Other products like QuietOn Sleep additionally include ACTIVE noise cancellation where they emit anti-sound to cancel out background noise and sounds lie snoring. So, the Bose Sleepbuds are just like fancy earplugs, except they also play pre-determined relaxing noises to help you sleep. To be clear: YOU cannot choose sounds other than those Bose provides, these earbuds are not useful as normal daily earbuds.

However, despite being comfortable the Boase earbuds did NOT form a complete seal and this means that ‘quite a bit’ of sound gets in. If your partner is snoring or even making quiet sleep noise you DO definitely still hear them (I tried). So the audio IS required to mask sounds like snoring and, as I’ve already said, I couldn’t get the audio to work.

I have used speedo earplugs and they are less than $/£5 and they form a complete seal and block out snoring. However, Speedo earplugs are not comfortable if you lie on your side and, after a while, will give you painful ear infections. So they are not a longterm solution.

Alternatives:

 

 

Pros

  • Sweet-looking charging case with 30 hours of charge
  • Comfortable
  • Single-use battery life of 10 hours
  • Extremely lightweight at 2.4g, you don’t forget you are wearing them
  • It’s possible to sleep with them, even when laying on your side

Cons

  • They don’t work in the sense that I was unable to pair them
  • Expensive $249/£229/Eu222
  • Speedo swim plugs are about 1/100th the price.
  • Even if they worked, which they didn’t, you still couldn’t play music on them
  • I doubt the longevity of the rubber ‘loop’ if you lay on that ear as you sleep

 

Check Google and you will find that I am not alone. Plus, if you check the support pages and forums belonging to Bose, you will find further evidence of the issue I encountered.

I have VERY EXTENSIVE experience in pairing electronic devices to smartphones. With the exception of one other product, it’s only the Bose Sleepbuds II that have been unable to properly pair to my iPhone XR (Android is generally trickier).

Friends have tried pairing my earbuds on other Apple models and on an Android smartphone and the best that anyone managed was to pair one earbud. Bizarrely one person managed to pair the right bud (Android) and the best I managed was the left bud (iOS)…and, before you ask, YES I did ensure that any pairings were removed on all other phones before attempting a new pairing. Because each earbud could be paired by someone, that goes some way to eliminate the possibility of a faulty pair.

Q: Is 2 hours sufficient perseverance to try to pair earbuds?

A: I think so, don’t you?

L-R: Zoggs mouldable swimming gel | Jabra Elite 75t | Bose Sleepbuds II | QuietON Sleep | Speedo swim earplugs

 

This song sums up the experience nicely:

 

 

 

 

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