WORLDS FIRST CHATGPT TWS HEADPHONES! iKKO ActiveBuds Review

THESE are the WORLD’S FIRST CHATGPT headphones! Talk with ChatGPT, translate a conversation between friends who speak different languages, and have Spotify play from your headphone’s case rather than your phone! These are the iKKO ActiveBuds!

If you’re anything like me, you probably had one of two reactions to that – either you thought “OH WOW SO COOL!”, or you thought “um… what’s the point?” Don’t worry, I have had both of those reactions now, so let me explain what the deal with these things is – and trust me this is one you’ll want to watch.

Let’s start with looking at this at face value – the features. This is essentially and Android phone with TWS headphones built in. It features a slide-open compartment for the headphones, which feels beautifully reminiscent of the old slide-open phones anyone over like 20 had at some point. It’s a satisfying flick. On the front you’ll find a 1.8 inch AMOLED display – they don’t quote a resolution, just “326 PPI”, and 500 nits, I assume of peak brightness. Inside the case is a quad core ARM A53 based chip, making it rather low performance and not amazingly efficient. The headphones are IPX4 rated, meaning they are “sweat-proof”. On the battery front, iKKO claims 100 hours of standby time on 4G and 12 hours of runtime for the case, and 6 hours of battery life on the headphones with ANC on, plus another 24 hours from the case – assuming the case didn’t use the battery itself which it rather obviously does. Lastly you’ve got both WiFi and 4G connectivity, with a sim card tray on the left hand side.

As for the main features, the intro mentioned them, that being integrated TWS headphones, a ChatGPT app, and live translation. I’ll dig more into each of these, starting with the headphones. You’d imagine for a set of headphones that cost as much as these do – and from a brand known for making some fantastic IEMs – these would sound like some of the best headphones you’ve heard. Sadly, it seems most of the money went into the Android case, only leaving a fraction for the headphones. The audio quality from these is genuinely one of the worst I’ve heard. Straight out the box they are compressed, lacking a lot of bass and treble, and just sound like a mid 2000’s phone’s built in speaker. I wish I had the fancy testing gear to show you empirically just how naff these are, but you’ll just have to take my word for it for now.

I was somewhat hopeful that the fancy EQ modes iKKO brags about – the “Self-Tuning EQ Sound” – would be the saviour here, but… no. The only mode that gave passable quality was the “Rock” mode. Everything else made the quality noticeably worse. Just to emphasise how bad these sound, let me give you a demonstration. Here’s a royalty free track.

Now here’s what it sounds like when you use basically any of the EQ modes other than “Rock”.

Original.

EQ.

Yeah. Absolutely dreadful.

The icing on the cake though is the entire user experience. How do you think you’d change the volume on these headphones, when you’re playing music from the case? You know, the most basic functionality that a pair of headphones can offer? How do you think you’d do that? Maybe the big up and down slider thing on the front that looks an awful lot like a volume control? Nope… That acts as a scroll wheel when in some menus. Ok, maybe it’s in that “Quick Menu”, that would make sense… Ah, nope not there either. You’ve only got the option to mute here, not change the volume. Would you have guessed that you have you hold the power button down as if you’re going to hard-reset the device? No? Me neither! But there you go. Also, in a comical twist, pressing the up button does in fact increase the volume on this screen. Do you know what doesn’t work? THE DOWN BUTTON! Down does not decrease the volume. You can only turn the volume down by pressing the button on the screen. Amazing. This is a fundamental function of headphones, so for this to be buried in this ONE place and not readily accessible is a microcosm of what’s wrong with this thing.

Another key and frankly basic function of a set of BLUETOOTH headphones is that they connect to your device via BLUETOOTH. Do you know what gets turned off every time you put the headphones back into the case? You guessed it, Bluetooth! You need to swipe open the menu, scroll to the bottom, long press settings, open connected devices, then turn Bluetooth on, and more often than not you need to connect to the headphones too. Otherwise your music will blare from the case’s integrated speaker and of course you can’t control the volume of that without long-pressing the power button too. Again, this is fundamental function of wireless headphones, and it doesn’t work here.

Another fundamental function of a media player is media controls. If you happen to be in the Spotify app, you can use the hilariously small icons to play or pause, or change tracks. If you leave the Spotify app, say to actually connect the damn headphones, you can’t do anything to pause the music, except painstakingly reopen Spotify as if it wasn’t already playing music in the background, then open the main controls, then pause. You’d think that maybe you could swipe down from the home page to get the quick access menu and pause it from there, but no, there is no quick access menu. The “Quick Menu” doesn’t contain media controls. Hell, even the volume and restart menu doesn’t have them! Best case if the headphones are connected you can double tap either to pause or play, but as far as I can find that’s it. Another fundamental feature that’s been overlooked.

Since we’ve talked about Spotify a fair bit, I think it’s worth mentioning that to install Spotify, you need to open the iKKO Store, then install it from there. Except it’s clear that it just downloads what I assume is a heavily modified version of the Spotify APK file. Not through the Play Store, from their own servers, and here’s the kicker. You need to manually enable the “Install from Unknown Sources” setting in settings for this to install anything. To make that clear: you need to disable a key security feature that prevents malware from being installed, in order to use the main advertised features of this product. This alone should be enough to make you run for the hills.

As a further aside, this is how you log into Spotify by the way. Yeah, that’s a full keyboard on this smartwatch sized screen. It’s almost impossible to use, especially because it’s actually the Chinese keyboard which you’ll have to manually disable in settings in favour of Gboard. Plus, of course, there’s the Spotify UI. Even in “Car Mode” it’s impossibly small and frankly a pain to use.

Back to the bigger picture – that app store is remarkably barren. Here’s the complete list. Spotify, Gboard, iKKO’s wrapper on Google Translate, iKKO’s wrapper on ChatGPT, their music app, and the app store itself. Apple music? Nope. Youtube music? Nope. Any kind of communications app that isn’t the pre-installed “Phone” and “Messages”? Nope. To be clear, their main product page states Apple Music support – see, it’s right here – but it is missing from the app store. I guess that’s the “more app updating coming soon” they’re talking about. In fact, of the 9 apps they show in that image clear enough to make out, only 6 of them are on the device. “Map” and “Time Focus” are missing too.

One frustration I’ve mentioned but haven’t commented on is the requirement to long-press apps in the main menu to open them. While I get that this might be some form of pocket-dial protection, it isn’t explained or obvious. I had to work it out. If you happen to watch one of their videos explaining the more advanced features you might happen to pick it up, but you shouldn’t need a youtube video to explain an incredibly basic function. That’s bad UI. And actually in the same vain, why can you only access the “quick menu” from the main menu via a swipe and long press? That’s hardly quick. Why can’t you swipe from the top like you would on an Android phone or WearOS watch? Another nitpick is in the volume/reset menu page. How do you think you’d return to the app you were in after changing the volume? Press the power button again to close it? Nope, that closes whatever app you were in. Press home? Nope, same deal. Would you think that the X would be it? I didn’t. I thought that would close the app I was just in. If it’s a back button it should really have a back button icon.

One of the key, highlighted features is active noise cancellation, which does work, if somewhat poorly as there is a noticeable drop in audio quality with it enabled, but the thing that gets me is… how do you turn it on? There’s nothing in the quick menu, there’s nothing in settings… It turns out there are two ways to do it, and neither are particularly obvious. The first is long-pressing the capacitive button on the right headphone to change the mode, or even less obviously, from the home screen if you swipe up or down in this specific area, you can scroll through “Transparency”, “ANC” or “Standard” modes. Nothing else on this UI is something you can interact with, so how the hell would you know to swipe this bit of text? It’s really bad UI design.

The last, and one of the most disappointing, parts of the user experience I want to highlight is the interaction between the case, headphones and your phone. While it might be handy to have this as a standalone device, odds are you have your phone on you anyway, and might want to connect your Bluetooth headphones to your phone. You’d kind of hope that you could just pair to the case, and then the case would act much like an Android smartwatch would, as a media controller. Sadly, as best as I can tell, you’re essentially just connecting two phones together, and the headphones are completely separate. Once you connect the headphones to your phone, the case is essentially worthless. There’s zero interaction between the case and the headphones, save for charging – hell even the volume control doesn’t work. The only thing that might change, assuming the case actually has Bluetooth on, is your ability to change the active noise cancellation from the display. That’s it.

On a technical level, there’s another problem with this being basically an Android phone with some headphones built in. It drains it battery in 3 or 4 days without you ever touching it. If you forget to charge your headphones phone case for a couple days, it’ll be as dead as a dodo in under a week. I don’t think I charge my regular TWS headphones more than once a month! What’s even funnier is that I left these on charge for a full day – I was somewhat incapacitated with my various disabilities so forgot about them. When I came to test them again, they were dead! STILL PLUGGED INTO A WORKING CHARGER! You couldn’t write a worse story for these…

So, that’s the ActiveBuds… wait we didn’t talk about the whole ChatGPT thing. Yeah, it has it. It cuts of responses pretty regularly. The whole tap to start/stop listening is clunky and doesn’t register clicks regularly. It’s a less useful experience than using the ChatGPT app on your phone. Also, if you don’t like the voice it uses, you can switch it in settings to an “AI Voice”… oh no wait, you can’t because that’s “coming soon”. Why put the button here then? Also the default language was Chinese so you’ll need to change that too.

The translation app is really just google translate. It works fine enough, with the same clunky press to start/stop listening feature, although this has the added gimmick that you can put one headphone in your ear, and the other headphone in someone else’s ear so you can have a back and forth conversation. Except, if you need to translate you probably don’t know the person, so who’d accept an in-ear headphone from a rando? You do have the option to use the case’s speaker and microphone as the other side, but using the Google Translate app on my phone works way, way better and is a lot less clunky and weird. Just like the ChatGPT app, this is clearly unfinished. This has the same “coming soon” option for the “AI Voice”, but weirder if you select the notepad icon, or go to “Memos” then “Documents”, you get a black screen with a red bin button at the bottom left, and a check icon on the bottom right. Hitting the check brings a dialog saying “Please select at least one option!”… WHAT OPTIONS?? Clearly this is a work in progress.

So, to recap, this is: an insecure custom version of Android with 4G connectivity and sideloaded, modified versions of popular apps – AKA virus central and a security nightmare; a terrible UX. Just, dreadful. They forgot they were making headphones and focused so much on “WORLDS FIRST CHAT GPT” that they relegated the volume control to the reboot menu; terrible battery life – like dead in 3 days on standby type terrible. You’ll never get good battery life out of the headphones because the case will kill itself before you could ever recharge them; the headphones themselves suck. 3/10 at best, and their EQ modes make that a 0/10. 1/10 if I’m being charitable because they do still actually produce sound; they want, currently, £310 for the pleasure. Hahahahahahahahahahahaha no.