APRIL 2020 MACWORLD 111The charging
case has flat
edges and sharp
corners to help it
stand on its own,
but they make it
uncomfortable
to carry.700s, I got pretty
good at laying my
hand along my
jawbone, cupping
my chin, and lining
up my finger with
the touch-button—
but that’s way
harder than it
should be.
The capacitive
buttons also
caused problems
when I took the
earbuds out of my
ears. If someone
started talking to me on the street, for
example, I usually paused my music and
pulled out both earbuds, holding them in
my hand. Most of the time, I returned the
BT 700s to my ears to find that a random
movement of my fingers or brush of my
skin had been felt as a purposeful double-
tap, and my music (or worse, my
audiobook or podcast) had been carrying
on without me.
Double-tapping the left earbud toggles
an ambient sound feature, piping in a bit of
the outside world. This should be an
important safety feature—headphones
blocking noise from traffic or other
pedestrians is often blamed for collisions—
but I found it impossible to use. The
slightest air movement from air
conditioning or a breeze filled the BT 700s
with static noise, and even simple sounds
like jangling a set of keys were distorted
enough to be unidentifiable. The same
pausing/un-pausing problems with the
capacitive button also toggled the ambient
sound feature on randomly until I really
started to hate it.
The charging case for the BT 700s is
needlessly bulky: at almost four inches
long and 1.5 inches thick, it is easily twice
as long and thick as the Apple AirPods
case; at 93 grams, it’s almost three times
as heavy. At least some of this size and
weight comes from the charging case’s
onboard bluetooth speaker, a feature I did
not like at all. The speaker is tinny and
adds a fair amount of background noise