I just started getting back into swimming. I had the Swimp3 players 15 years ago that made swimming a lot less dull and was looking for whatever the new version of that was. These are better for a host of reasons.
First, they stay in place pretty darn well. My old mp3 player was bulky on the side of my goggle strap, and if I did butterfly, they would fling around and I had to stop to fix them. These stay put just fine, even when I jumped in the water from the pool deck. It does feel a little weird to put these on and then to put my cap over the ear part (I can't have my ears out of my cap entirely or it would pop off and/or drive me nuts), but I sort of got used to it. There were some times that I had to tug down the sides of my cap over my ears because it was riding up, but that may have been unrelated to this device. The back of the neck portion stayed outside my cap the whole time and if it moved around at all, I didn't notice it.
These are also plenty loud. I had to click them down a few notches from the max volume to be a comfy listening volume. I didn't use the earplugs, but had no problem hearing them clearly, whether or not my head was underwater.
With my old mp3 player, I could hear them somewhat even when they weren't on my face. I could tell that some other people could hear it somewhat, too, since I got some funny looks when my music started playing. But with these Shokz, it didn't seem like anyone else could hear them.
It is annoying to me that there isn't more playlist control (song order, etc.) and that there's no way to transmit tunes via bluetooth from my phone directly to the device. But I will say that the magnetic USB charging/data cable is pretty slick. It clicked on so easily that I didn't even think it was really plugged in until I saw the light and it auto-opened the file window on my computer.
One thing I was really happy about is that it can play M4A files, no problem. I was worried that I'd have to do some lame mp3 conversion to get them to play, but I didn't. I just made a playlist in iTunes (all individually purchased music) and copy/pasted into the file window for the Shokz.
Room for improvement in future models? Sure. But for now, this is a HUGE upgrade over my 15-year-old version and it works well enough for me to be very happy with them.
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