You must have read our review on boAt Airdopes 601 ANC which was launched in January this year. We started to review the product from March onwards and witnessed a great user experience initially. For almost 2 months, I took all my calls from the airdopes only and enjoyed a wireless connection with great deliverables.
It was very recent when I started to face a lot of trouble with the earbuds from boAt. The earbuds started performing activities on my handset without even being given a command. Like, for instance:
- When the earbuds are connected with the Android or an iOS device, it will automatically start to play music, when you pull out the earbuds from the case. No matter if you play it or not
- For a hands-free calling experience, the Airdopes have been weirdly performing the stances- like receiving the call will disconnect the buds and then you have to manually touch on the Bluetooth icon on the home screen to pair it with your earbuds
- At times, when you charge your Airdope’s case, the left earbud might show 0% charge, whereas the case and right earbud might display 100% charge. I have seen this abnormal act several times before I wrote it here. And the left earbud will stop working totally.
- When you are watching some reels or videos on Instagram, or Facebook or in case you are scrolling some social media, and when you suddenly plan to connect your earbuds (which are already paired with your handset), you will witness the song start to play from the music app which you use on your handset 'automatically' - overlapping the sound of 2 platforms together (music app and the social media app which is open on your screen). Weird, right!
- The automatic song app starts to play even when you are on WhatsApp calls (no matter if it is an audio or video call). And even if you have stopped the music app from your background, the earbud, when you pull out of the case, will automatically open the app and play the song without seeking your permission. This indeed is an annoying bug which I have been facing with my review unit.
The Airdopes 601 ANC features an active noise-cancellation feature which still works perfectly, the sound quality is great and clear and the battery life is appreciable, as mentioned in our previous review. The earbuds are available on Flipkart at a price tag of Rs. 4,999 (at the time of writing) and it is priced at Rs. 3,999 on the boAt’s official website.
But witnessing the long-term performance of the Airdopes 601 ANC (basis of almost three months of usage for voice calls, zoom calls, video calling, listening to music etc), we still wonder if the unit which we reviewed has this connectivity trouble or if it's with the entire range only.
I would like to state that India TV has been reviewing a number of earbuds, from brands like OnePlus, Inbase, Jabra, and Oppo which have performed flawlessly even after 3-4 months of heavy usage. This has been our first boAt earbud experience from the company and certainly, we expected it to be much better, under this price point though.
Kindly note that the above review has been written on the basis of personal experience for 3 months