Poco has announced the launch of the Buds X1 TWS earbuds in India at a price point of Rs 1,799. The new Buds X1 offers a good amount of features, such as Active Noise Cancellation, transparency mode, gaming mode, and much more. However, in a crowded market such as India where hundreds of more options are available from other brands, can the Poco Buds X1 stand out from the crowd? Let’s find out.
Poco Buds X1: Comfort & Design
The Poco Buds X1 are available in a single Titanium shade with yellow accents. The Poco branding in yellow resides on the back, while the inner part of the case is also made from yellow. The case has a matte finish and is quite compact to carry. The lid feels rigid and closes and opens with a spring mechanism, which helps it stay in place and keeps it from getting loose.
Then there’s a white light at the front that lights up when you shut or open the case or when you place the buds inside to charge. Overall, the case feels premium in the hand and also looks elegant. Coming to the buds, the ear tips also have a dual-tone look with transparent gray and yellow elements.
The buds have the commonly found stem design and fit well in the ear. They are lightweight and comfortable at the same time, which makes them easily wearable for extended periods of time. These buds also feature touch controls that can be customised via the Xiaomi Earbuds app. One can double tap, triple tap, or tap & hold to perform various actions that can be changed via the app, such as skip or go backwards, trigger voice assistant, control volume, and more.
Design-wise, I’d say the Poco Buds X1 look and feel top-notch. They have a distinct look with the yellow accents and also don’t feel cheap by any means.
Poco Buds X1: App support, Sound & Call Quality, Battery Life
The Poco Buds X1 packs 12.4mm dynamic titanium drivers and supports SBC and AAC codecs. They also support 40dB Active Noise Cancellation, dual mics on each earbud, and Bluetooth v5.3.
The audio quality of the Poco Buds X1 sounded decent during our testing. However, the mid-range frequencies are tuned slightly higher than the low-end and high-end ones, which may cause the audio to sound muffled at times.
The vocals are clear, and the bass has that kick to it. You can clearly feel the bass hitting in which those who prefer a bassy sound signature would love. The bass doesn’t overpower other frequencies, which is a good thing.
However, a bug or maybe a defect in our unit ruined our audio experience for the most part. We could make out our observations during a short period of time when the buds worked fine because, after that, a bug would degrade the audio quality and would cause an imbalance. The imbalance in audio quality often lowered the volume in the left earbud, and the sound signature also kept fluctuating.
We don’t know whether it’s a software bug that could be solved with a firmware update or a hardware defect with our particular unit.
Noise Cancellation is close to average, as it neither cancels out noise well nor has the best transparency mode. Despite supporting cancellation up to 40dB, I didn’t find it the most effective with fan noise, traffic noise, etc. Further, the transparency mode feels like a gimmick because the sound is majorly muffled even when it’s turned on.
Connectivity performance is decent. However, there’s no multipoint connection support.
The app supports a decent number of features, such as showing the battery left in buds and cases, changing Noise Cancellation modes, and customising the touch controls, as discussed above.
Furthermore, the “find your earphones” feature offered through the app is practically useless because the sound volume of a song is louder than the alarm tone the earbuds play when you use this feature.
Next up, you also get the ability to set equaliser either from the four predefined options or a custom one where Poco offers you to customise the sound signature with a 10-band equaliser which is amazing at this price point. Out of all the options available, I found the custom one to be the best as I could tune the audio to my liking.
The call quality of the Poco Buds X1 is good, but it doesn’t come without drawbacks. While my voice was clear to the recipient for the most part, the person on the other end complained of some disturbance in my voice, which caused them to be unable to make out what I was saying. Additionally, the buds pick up background noise to some extent during calls, but not in a manner that could hamper the quality.
Finally, for the battery life, Poco claims the buds can last up to 36 hours with ANC off and up to 22 hours with ANC on. They can run for up to 3.5 hours on a single charge with ANC turned on and up to 7 hours with ANC off. However, these stats are Poco’s own when the earbuds are at 50% volume.
In the real world, the buds lasted about 3 hours and sometimes less on a single charge as I listened to them at higher volumes. While we couldn’t exactly get close to Poco’s claimed battery backup numbers, we think Poco could have done better in this area.