Motorola Hint Earbud

 January 2015 – At CES the Lenovo display was showing the new Motorola Droid and Droid X phones and accessories. Among these was the new Hint Bluetooth Earbud. Designed for simplicity and high functionality the earbud comes in a dual use storage and charging case. The earbud is voice controlled and has automatic on-off features. The sensors in the earbud, turn the unit on when placed in the ear, and put the unit into standby or off mode when removed.

The unit when used for the first time, does an auto-paring with the phone or mobile device. Designed for Android and other Bluetooth devices, the auto paring function was quick and easy – it was completed without instructions other than inserting the earbud in your ear and setting the phone to pairing mode. The earbud responds to voice commands. For a standard Android phone, it responds to “answer call” and “reject call”. With a Motorola phone, the voice command app gives access to full voice dialing from the contact list, text to voice and other voice controlled functions.

The earbud when charged states it has about 3 hrs of talk time and 5 days of standby time. In using the earbud, it has provided over 2.5hrs of talk on a typical use cycle over a 7 day period before saying is was on low power. Most likely, it would have the full three hours of talk if needed. The unit has a recharging case that holds the earbud, so running the unit down to no power is difficult to measure. The earbud recharges from the holder even when not connected to a power source, so plugging in the case once a week to charge will keep the unit fully available.

Motorola Hint Bluetooth Earbud

The earbud has multiple sized covers to fit different sized individuals. The unit is pretty clear to listen to, and has noise cancellation on the microphone pickup. As the unit sits in the ear and is fairly sheltered, wind noise is not an issue. The pickup for the unit is somewhat hampered by the noise processing capabilities of Bluetooth 4 (AKA Bluetooth Low Power). Many times when the phone switch cells and the BT interface resets, it comes up on a noisy connection that leads the listener on the other side to hear “tunnel talk” with echoing. This is more of a protocol issue rather than an earbud issue, but iti s worth noting as it happens frequently.

All in all the unit is very comfortable to wear for those with medium to large ears, and the talk time is quite long. It has the advantage of being an in-ear product, so wearers with eye glasses will not be hampered when using the product. The Hint earbud is available at most locations where Motorola phones are sold.