- [Dan] Hey this is Dan with The Verge,
and this is Microsoft's new Surface Earbuds.
This is the companies first truly wireless earbuds
and they follow along the Surface Headphones
that were announced last year
in the companies new audio line-up of products.
As you can see they're pretty similar
to other wireless earbuds we've seen before.
You wear them in your ears,
you've got a little case that you put them in to charge,
and it's got a USB-C port to charge it back up,
and Microsoft says these will last
about eight hours on a charge,
and in the case you get a full 24 hours.
So it's pretty standard stuff that we've seen
from other companies before.
Now if you look at the design of these,
you can tell that they do look a little bit different.
They're quite a bit bigger than maybe
you're used to from say Samsung's Galaxy Buds,
or even Apple's AirPods.
But they're so big because there is this
touchpad on the outside that you can use
to control a bunch of functions,
you can skip tracks, you can raise volume,
you can launch applications
if you've got it connected to an Android phone,
play Spotify automatically, things like that.
And they like are typical sounding earbuds,
these do not seal out sound,
they are designed to allow ambient sound in,
and here we are in the demo area.
It's super loud, there's some bumping music
like a club at I don't know,
it's at noon right now.
So it's kind of hard to tell
how these things actually sound in here.
But if I were playing music,
I would be able to hear it through my ears
and also be able to hear the ambient sound.
There's no noise cancellation,
or anything else like that.
Now because this is Microsoft,
they don't just play music.
They actually do some other things,
then there's some microphones on here
and some technology Microsoft has developed
with PowerPoint and its AI processing
to allow you to speak into the headphones
while you're presenting say a PowerPoint slide show,
and it will live transcribe
what you're saying on the screen.
So I can say, "Hey this is Dan with The Verge,
"and these are Microsoft's new Surface Earbuds.
"This is the companies first truly wireless earbuds
"and they accompany the Surface Headphones
"that were announced last year
"as part of Microsoft's new audio product line-up."
Pretty wild.
The design on the inside is
a little bit different than other earbuds,
this ear tip does not actually go inside
your ear canal like I said before,
it's not designed to block out sounds.
It's supposed to let sounds in,
so it kind of just rests in there
and then there's a little hook
on the back side of it that when you rotate
the earbud into your ear it kind of locks in place.
Microsoft's including a few different sizes with this
so you can customize it to fit your ears
and find whichever size is most comfortable
and fits you best without falling out of your ear.
And Microsoft says these will be available
before the holidays this year,
so real soon.
They're gonna sell for about $250
which is a bit more expensive
than what we're used to seeing
from say like AirPods which start at 160,
or Samsung's Galaxy Buds which are about 130.
So Microsoft is really counting
on the added productivity features
that are coming with these to justify that price.
Obviously we're gonna have a review
coming for them when these are released
and we'll have lost more time
to test out their audio quality
and see what they're like in the real world.
But that's a real quick first look
at Microsoft's Surface Earbuds.
Hey thanks for watching.
There's a ton of other stuff
that Microsoft announced today,
there's new Surface Pro laptops,
there's new Surface laptop laptops,
and then the company actually announced
a new foldable thing that's not coming for another year
we've got it, all of it
on theverge.com and also youtube.com/theverge
so please go check it out.