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1MORE Comfobuds review – an AirPods look with a Tide Pods price

So you know we make money when we sell you things, putting that out there right at the start because this isn’t that review. What follows is me fighting with what turn out to be a pretty OK set of earbuds called the 1MORE Comfobuds.

1MORE Comfobuds

The 1MORE Comfobuds (I feel,) are slightly too expensive for what they are as of this writing. These are some really good $35 or so earbuds currently priced at $60 (although there is a $10 coupon on them currently.)

They sound good, but not particularly overwhelming due to lack of any air-tight seal in the ear, lack of replacement ear gels, and the like. Imagine about the best sound you can get in-ear without an airtight seal and that’s about where you’re at. Slightly better than average, but I’ve had $19 wired earbuds, and $30 wireless that sound better due to an air seal.

But these look vaguely like AirPods so I think there’s a cool factor involved here.

What follows here may be considered “old man yells at instructions”


Problems at the start

I’ve included the entirety of the English instruction manual there. Feel free to read. I’d like to be wrong on this but I don’t think I am. The pairing button is never diagrammed and I think I discovered it shortly after starting writing.

1MORE Comfobuds
Location is very tiny plastic protective covers a red/green colorblind fellow might have issue with

I popped the buds out of their charging coffin, put them in, and nothing. Dead. Placed them on the charger, the coffin said it was fully charged in about 10 minutes, tried tried again, dead. Huh. It’s odd for me to get a review unit in that’s dead. Turns out there were two invisible (to a colorblind me,) slightly reddish pieces of removable plastic over the contactors.

I managed to spot them later, there’re two others that are on the unit which cover some microphones I believe, total of four that don’t stick out to a red/green colorblind fellow, so learn from my fail.

There’s no notice of this in the documentation and really, this is the first product this has ever been a visual issue with for me.

I pulled the Comfobuds out, they automatically went into pairing mode without finding the pairing button (which I believe is the thing in the charging coffin but it doesn’t feel like a button when pressed,) and bam, I was off to the races.

Highs are great, mids are mehs, and bass is about where you would expect without an air sealed ear. They’re loud, but more like your “quiet yelling” kind of loud. I listened to a few songs and was otherwise OK with these… they’d be fine $35 earbuds.


If you take the buds out, the music pauses. Tapping twice gives you a pause/answer options and supposedly you can define this in the app but the app doesn’t seem to have that when I checked.

The BT range on the Samsung Galaxy S21 Ultra to them was at least 15 feet through two plaster walls (or perhaps bouncing down a hallway.) I was actually impressed with that when I left the phone in the living room and wandered into the bathroom.

The earbud to earbud range appears to be about 11 feet meaning if your child grabs one and screams “it’s David Bowie… you’re listening to mister Bowie” and starts to run off with it they won’t get far before the earbud fails. I guess this would be useful if you’re sharing some music with a friend.


Beyond the 1MORE Comfobuds

While there’s an app and a website mentioned to get firmware and do some buds tuning, they’ve got problems.

The QR code leads to a misconfigured domain, and the Android app has no options other than an equalizer and a 12 hour burn-in routine, which I’ve literally never heard of in 10ish years of testing audio equipment. It appears to just want to play white noise to “burn in” the headsets.

The burn in time, from the FAQ “Total ‘burn-in’ time varies depending on different headset. Some could be as short as dozens of hours; others could be a couple hundred hours. Hold your horses.”

image 10 - for some reason we don't have an alt tag here
Morgan Freeman: The bass did not, in fact, blow Paul away.

Yeah, I do not believe this. I mean, color me shocked, but I really don’t buy this considering I’ve never heard of this from any other headset manufacturer. I think it’s a tool to get you invested and the customer support version of turn it off and back on again. I can’t think of any reason to ship a product that required a day of user interaction and 3-4 power cycles to get it where it needs to be.

image 12 - for some reason we don't have an alt tag here
It doesn’t always register taps, or maybe Paul needs to get better at finding the tap zone

There’s a double-tap for action that there’s no way to configure what it does. Double-tap does not always work. Triple tap for assistant. Meh.


Overall

Incomplete documentation I’m used to, my assumption is the button thing that doesn’t feel like a button in the charging case is the re-pair button, the app is most likely worthless for anything other than occasional firmware updates and man does it want permissions, the audio quality is good, they’re comfy but not a snug fit, the mic is great in indoor conditions. Bass meh, midrange good, upper great.

4 hour play time with 4+ charges…

They are … ok… I mean I don’t hate them, but I’d expect at this price in these times the app would be ok, the website wouldn’t be throwing errors, there wouldn’t be a 12+ hour break in suggested in app, that there might be an active noise cancelling option (they have an environmental noise cancelling which works for phone calls mostly.) They’re ok. At $35 I’d recommend. At $60 … as stated, they’re ok.

I’d love for you to buy them through my links, but I can’t recommend them at the price, with the domains down, and that app.

You can grab the 1MORE Comfobuds at Amazon. Tagged link, I would make something if you bought them there or even clicked and bought milk. Just go to Amazon and search if you want an untagged link.

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Paul E King

Paul King started with GoodAndEVO in 2011, which merged with Pocketables, and as of 2018 he's evidently the owner. He lives in Nashville, works at a film production company, is married with two kids. Facebook | Twitter | Donate | More posts by Paul | Subscribe to Paul's posts

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