OnePlus Buds promised to have 30-hour battery life with a catch

Thanks to ditching the headphone jack, Apple has made truly wireless stereo earbuds like the AirPods more popular and in-demand. They're definitely handy to have in your ear and if the design is just right, you might even forget you're wearing them at times. For all their convenience and features, their tiny bodies can only hold so much battery to last a few hours of use. That's why earbud makers are competing not just in audio quality but also in battery life, making OnePlus' claim one of the biggest in the market.

30 hours of battery life is no small matter for tiny earbuds but, of course, there's a little bit of marketing there. OnePlus computed the total battery life when you take into account the charging case. Given that it says you can charge the buds more than three times to get that number, the buds themselves could average around 6 hours on a full charge on average.

Users will probably charge the buds that many times if OnePlus truly meets its design goals. Its observations showed that people sometimes use TWS earbuds more than their phones so they aimed to make them comfortable to wear all day long. In addition to weighing just 4.6 grams, the earbuds adopt a half-in-ear design for comfort, which probably means it will look a bit more like Apple AirPods than, say, Google Pixel Buds of Samsung Galaxy Buds+.

The theme of being "burdenless" extends to the user experience, says OnePlus, meaning it should "just work" as you expect it to. Unfortunately, it doesn't yet go into much detail about how it has implemented the controls and what features one can expect, but we only have to wait for a week to find out anyway.

The OnePlus Buds will work with any Bluetooth-enabled device, the company assures, but it is also optimized for OnePlus phones. Switching to gaming mode on such a phone, for example, will supposedly deliver ultra-low latency that almost matches wired headphones. The buds will launch together with the OnePlus Nord on July 21 so it won't take long to truly hear what it has to offer in an already congested TWS earbuds market.