I’m a huge fan of earbuds. There are no strings from earbuds to phone, and no tangled wires from ear to ear. It’s a soothing experience, especially when you’re doing workout or just roaming around with listening to your favourite music. The Samsung Gear Iconx stands good on their wireless promise, especially because I find them comfortable for earbuds in this category.

Samsung Gear IconX – Design

The Samsung Gear IconX arrive packaged in a cylindrical charging case, that can fit easily into a pocket or purse. opening the case brings the two earbuds, each designed with a minimalistic design and perfectly fitted into their respective charging docks. As marked on the inside of the case, there’s one for your left and right ear. There are LED’s on the case to indicate the charging status of the earphones, as well as the case itself. Samsung gear iconx looks really premium & futuristic.

Comfort and User Interface

Samsung provides three sizes of ear-tips for customized fit, along with three sizes of wingtips. The wingtips help to keep the IconX stabilized in your ear sockets. Once properly adjusted, the earbuds just sort of pleases you with the music listening and exercise experiences. They also stay firmly planted in ears, unless you plan to do some serious parkour moves 😛 .

There aren’t any buttons whatsoever. It’s quiet easy and comfortable to control the Samsung gear IconX from the touchpads on the earbuds themselves.
The Gear IconX sit snug in your ears in the most comfortable way. So you can do whatever you want while listening music. The controls are really simple, as mentioned above in the picture.

Samsung Gear IconX Review

Sound Quality

I’m a big audiophile, but I’m not going to bore you with meaningless descriptions of the Samsung gear IconX’s highs, mids, and lows. Most of us use Wire-free earbuds mainly as exercise earbuds. And when I’m working out, I mostly only care about volume and bass. Thats all i want to bring on my beast mode & enjoy my session. The sound is enough loud to cut out the sounds of equipment’s in the gym or general ambient sounds. I want you to check all ear-tip before deciding which one to use, i found bass response improvement when i did.

Because all wire-free earbuds rely on Bluetooth for connectivity. some degree of dropouts should be expected. Luckily, the IconX suffered relatively infrequent number when streaming music from phone. The gear IconX are fitted with microphones, making them a Bluetooth headsets for phone conversations. the mic volume is enogh loud, you will be happy with it.

Playing music – On-board and streaming

The Samsung Gear IconX comes with 4GB of on-board storage to your music files. A nice additional feature you won’t find in most of the wire-free competition. Usable memory is quoted at less than 3.5GB, but Samsung says this is still good for about 1,000 music tracks. Supported formats include MP3, M4A, AAC, WAV, and WMA v9.

Playing on-board music will result in some extra battery life, which you’ll be grateful for. Playing tracks from internal memory also grants a greater degree of personal freedom, as you won’t need to carry your phone in your hand or pocket. Most importantly when exercising. All in all, the on-board music function is a killer value-add.

To load music into the Samsung Gear IconX, you connect the IconX to your PC via USB, then fire up Samsung’s Gear IconX Manager desktop software, and transfer music files from a local PC storage to the manager app. It’s an easy process.

Another thing worth mentioning is compatibility. Samsung says you should be running Android 4.4 or higher on a phone with at least 1.5GB of RAM. Despite that you can play music on your ios device, but only for listening to music with. So all Iphone & Ipad owners, no need to worry.

Heart-rate Tracking and S Health Integration

At CES 2014, Intel unveiled a prototype for earbuds with built-in heart rate sensors, and most of the people thought it was science fiction. Today, heart-rate sensors on earbuds are reality. Aimed toward fitness freaks, and now Samsung gear iconx added this value-add. Whether you’re walking or running, its smart enough to track your activity and give updates on essential data from speed, distance and duration to heart rate and calories burnt.

The IconX are being presented primarily as fitness headphones, and to that end they do a solid job. You can enjoy music with or without your phone. But you’ll need to sync with S Health app in order to get the most out of the IconX. You can also pair them with select third-party apps, like Strava & MyFitness, but only to track your heart rate.
You can also hear your heart-rate data directly through the earbuds. All you have to do is turn on the “Exercise audio guide” in the Gear app. From there, long-press one of the touchpads to start a workout session. All your heart-rate data (along with other exercise data) will be shared via a pleasant-sounding robot voice at specific intervals. You can choose between distance intervals and time intervals.

Voices are recorded by real human beings in 15 different languages, motivation just got personal. If you don’t want the robotic voice to disturb you middle in listening song, the alternative is Samsung’s S Health app. You can view your heart-rate data there.

Battery life

When you ditch your headphone jack for Bluetooth earphones, you suddenly start worrying about battery-life. The Samsung Gear IconX will last up-to 3.4 to 3.8 hours of continuous music when playing tracks off of on-board storage, and between 1.5 and 1.6 hours when streaming music from your phone. Numbers may vary.

Without the handset, it will last longer, and while the fact the case can give them another full charge is a nice feature. If you’re only using them for music, this feature will be more useful.

So, wrapping up the Review lets find out Pro’s & Con’s of Samsung Gear IconX.

Samsung Gear IconX Review

THE GOOD	THE BAD
Comfortable design Rich sound Built-in Heart rate sensor Works as a standalone player Intuitive controls Carrying case works as charging dock	Average battery life

Our Verdict

Not only Samsung Gear IconX is a highly functional fitness tracker, it’s possibly the smallest music player out there. long story short –  If you’re looking to cut the cord, Samsung Gear IconX is the best premium earbuds available for you.

 

Good Read – Vava Flex Vs Panasonic ErgoFit – Comparison & Review