My faithful Pixel Buds A started misbehaving (left bud audio quality dropped), and I was curious about Nothing devices, and these were on sale, so this was an easy purchase. I like the case design even though the earbuds will probably go flying when I drop the case as is always the case with magnetic closures.
Sound quality is good enough for the price point, with surprisingly good ANC and transparent mode. There's a little lag with transparent mode, but I'm thinking that's to be expected with wireless earbuds. I don't know if the call quality is any good, I'll try to test that soon, but it shouldn't be horrible. Charge speed and capacity are on par with my old Pixel buds so far. I didn't go so far as looking up the codecs, but it's 2025, I'm sure this manufacturer knows better than to use a codec from 2008 unless the phone or computer can't hack anything else. Pairing was stupidly easy and my phone detects these much quicker than the Pixel buds.
Generally speaking I hate dedicated apps for peripheral devices, it's less secure, it's less private, it's a pain to go and download yet another app that could do shady stuff like serve up ads. But the Nothing app is a breath of fresh air here, it does exactly what it needs to do and nothing more. The only thing I might possibly complain about is that you can't turn off the touch control completely. Touch control is something I've always had problems with in terms of ghost touches and unintended controls, and I think that if you want to implement controls in the earbuds, tactile switches are a much better way. But some of the controls are mandatory, so I'll have to live with them.
In a world where 150+ dollar earbuds get blog reviews and much hype, the CNF series quietly deliver serious bang for the buck.
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