OnePlus Buds 4 Review: Sound Quality, Battery Life, Midrange Value

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OnePlus is having a pretty great year. The company started off with one of the best smartphones of the year — to this day. It followed it with the awesome OnePlus Watch 3 with ridiculous battery life. Then, it launched one of the largest and lightest tablets you can find with the OnePlus Pad 3. Today, OnePlus launched a smaller version of the OnePlus Watch 3 (43mm) and a new set of earbuds, the OnePlus Buds 4.

I had tempered expectations going into this review — they're not the "Buds 4 Pro" after all. I wondered which corners they'd cut on the way in. As it turns out, not too many. I've always been a fan of OnePlus's earbuds, and it's good to see the tradition continue. There are a few corners cut that I would've liked to see. So that's what we're going to take a look at. I've been using a OnePlus Buds 4 review sample for about two weeks in planes, trains, and automobiles, and this is my full review.

The design of the OnePlus Buds is pretty basic, to be honest. My review sample came in the black colorway which adds to that basic style. The case for the buds is the same egg-shape that OnePlus has practically trademarked at this point. There's no extra design or material on there, like the vegan leather on the OnePlus Buds 3 Pro, so there's nothing that really makes them stand out.

The buds themselves are the pretty typical stem-and-bud configuration that slides into the case and magnetically attaches. The stem is touch sensitive and can accept taps, tap and hold, and slides up and down. I always appreciate that last gesture because it gives you control over your volume in an intuitive way. The buds case also has a very hard to see reset button on the left side of the case for when you need to manually force a Bluetooth connection.

Overall, I like the sound on the earbuds quite a bit. The passive isolation is pretty good on its own, and the Active Noise Cancellation is just okay. Passthrough — where you can hear what's going on around you — and sidetone — where you can hear your own voice in your ears with the buds in — are also both in the "just okay" category.

As for the sound itself, it's very good in terms of what you can hear throughout the spectrum. Bass is very bassy, mid-tones are very refined, and high end is solid but not ear piercing. I listened to a number of different artists during my testing including Lindsey Stirling, Scorpions, Five Finger Death Punch, and Skillet. I admit, my music tastes are weird and limited. I also listened to a few different podcasts and watched some movies on long flights.

I ended up adjusting the equalizer a bit to refine the sound to my tastes, but honestly, the sound out of the box was already very well tuned. Speaking of which, the equalizer is a tad limited at just six bands, so it's a good thing these already sound very good.

OnePlus hah had a long relationship with the "HeyMeoldy" app, which is a sort of white-label apps that a number of different earbud manufacturers use when they don't want to build their own earbud app. So many earbuds have similar functionality, it really doesn't make sense for every single earbud company to have it's own app. I get that, but I'm still not going to let OnePlus off the hook for using it. OnePlus is not a small company anymore— it has money. Hire some developers and get your own app please.

OnePlus already builds functionality into the OnePlus operating system if you're using OnePlus buds with a OnePlus phone. The Hey Melody app just takes over for non-OnePlus phones, which is what I paired the buds to. I can't tell you which phone I paired them to — not for another hour anyway. Stay tuned! All the same, this is something OnePlus really should address.

The HeyMelody app allows you to control most of the aspects of the buds, including the equalizer, finding the earbuds, and turning on spatial audio. You can also set up what the app calls your "golden sound." This is a customized hearing profile.

Typically when you take this test, you sit in a quiet room while the app plays you a series of tones, usually from low to high. When you can no longer hear the tone, you tap a button and move onto the next one. HeyMelody's app take a different tack. It still plays the tone, but you adjust the volume using a slider until you can't hear it anymore.

I found this to be a better way to do this, because when the app lowers the tone volume, I often think I can hear a tone when I probably can't any more. This way, by adjusting the volume myself, I have more control over it so I can be more sure. Of course, at the end of the day, the Golden tone didn't seem to change the sound profile that much for me. Still, I like the feature.

What I don't like are the limited options you get for changing the controls. Unlike the Nothing Headphone (1) where you can make any gesture do anything, the OnePlus buds are very limited in how you can change the controls. It's a little frustrating.

The OnePlus buds are good for about eleven hours of sound with another 34 hours in the case. I never teste earbuds from wire to wire in terms of charging, but I can tell you in over two weeks of testing, including two eight-hour flights, I've charged the buds case once, and I didn't even really feel like I had to. Battery life is exceptional.

One thing the buds lack is wireless charging, which, when you think about it, makes more sense to have in an earbud case than a phone. When you take the buds out of a case, you set it down. Why not charge it when you do that?

Fortunately, these are OnePlus buds, so when you have to charge them, you won't have to wait too long. Popping the buds into the case for 10 minutes will get you three and a half hours of playback. Charging the earbuds and the case for ten minutes will get you eleven hours of playback. It's almost enough to justify the lack of wireless charging — but not quite.

While the sound quality is quite good out of the box, the earbuds space is so crowded, HeyMelody decided to build a white-label app for earbud companies to use. Just consider that for a moment.

The OnePlus buds cost $129.99 on OnePlus.com and in the OnePlus Store on Amazon, and as usual, OnePlus has a few deals going on. If you use the offer code OnePlusBuds4 at checkout, you can get $30 off through July 30 at the company's website. $30 is about where the price should be to be honest. There are just so many great buds you can buy that sound great and even have extras like wireless charging that the OnePlus Buds 4 lack. It's hard to get too excited over these for that reason.

They're not bad, but they're pricey for what they bring to the table. By all means, if you're into the OnePlus ecosystem, these aren't a bad choice, but if you don't pick them up quickly, you'll pay for the privilege.