The Xiaomi Buds 3T Pro, like all Xiaomi smartphones, offers strong value for money. You get some really decent premium features packed in, including excellent active noise cancellation, but at a price that won’t absolutely molest your wallet. I’ve been using the Xiaomi Buds 3T Pro as my full-time true earbuds for the last week, and here I’m sharing my Audio Quality experience, ANC, Touch Controls, Battery Life performance, and My final thought.
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Xiaomi Buds 3T Pro Design
Now, a lot of Xiaomi’s true wireless earbuds rock a bullet-style design, whereas in the case of the Xiaomi Buds 3T Pro, you’ve got that dangly stem finish akin to Apple’s AirPods. If you prefer, you can grab the Xiaomi Buds 3T Pro in black as well as glossy white, and as far as the comfort levels go, no complaints whatsoever. The buds themselves weighed just about 5 grammes each, super light and comfortable as usual. With true wireless earbuds, you get a selection of differently sized silicon tips bundled in the box, so you can find a pair that fits your personal preferences. really neat, and I didn’t struggle to find a pair of silicone tips that fit my own perfectly. I found them comfortable to wear for three or four hours at a time, and Xiaomi Buds 3T Pro are ip55 water resistant, so no worries if you’re out in the rain or working up a sweat at the gym or something like that.
Setup and Bluetooth
On the Xiaomi Buds 3T Pro’s connectivity, there are no issues; it has Bluetooth 5.2 low energy support, and you can connect up to two devices at the same time, so for instance, it’s great if you want to get connected to your phone to listen to music or podcasts but also connect to your laptop whenever you need to jump on a quick Microsoft Teams call or just do a quick bit of video editing or something like that. and even when I was walking around the centre of a really busy city, I found that the connection wasn’t distorted at all by the fact that lots of other people were listening to headphones all around me. It was just perfect. The only issue I noticed in terms of the actual audio streaming and the connectivity was an occasional tiny bit of distortion when I hibernated my phone and put it back in my pocket. I was streaming Bluetooth music, podcasts, or whatever kind of sporadic issue, it was not really much of a problem at all, just a minor one at best.
No Xiaomi App?
Unfortunately, there is no dedicated app for the Xiaomi Buds 3T Pro. which is a real shame because a lot of true wireless earbuds do offer a companion app, so you can easily update the 3T Pro buds, you can’t keep tabs on the exact battery life, and you can’t play around with some of the features like the actual audio output and the noise cancellation. if you own a Xiaomi smartphone, then you will be able to access some extra tools and features through the Bluetooth settings menu, so you can toggle the noise cancellation on and off.
Xiaomi Buds 3T Pro Touch Controls
You do have touch controls on the actual buds themselves to cycle through the noise cancellation modes. You activate these controls by squeezing the stems, so to speak, rather than actually tapping the buds, which I thought worked quite well. because it meant that I didn’t accidentally activate the controls at all, even if I was just adjusting a bud or something like that. What you’ll need to do is a quick squeeze to pause your music, and another quick squeeze will resume it. If you do a double squeeze, then that will skip you forward a track, and a triple squeeze, if I can see it properly, will skip you back a track.
Now the double squeezes and the triple squeezers definitely take some getting used to; you’ve got to do them at just the right pace. and sometimes some of my squeezers don’t quite connect, shall we say, so I’m not the best around, but at least, as I said, you’re not accidentally active in at all skipping through your tracks when you just happily listen to your music or you know, skipping ahead in your podcast, and of course you can’t control the volume via the buds either, so if you do find that you are listening to a podcast, you need to bump up the volume to actually hear what’s going on, or you listen to music and all of a sudden it’s going crazy loud and you’re like, you have to pull your pocket and adjust it that way instead, and happily the Xiaomi buds 3t pro also support auto pause and auto resume. If you have to yank a butt out, tap it back in again. So if you do find that somebody comes up to you and starts flapping their jaws just like, Well, one sec there you go, you can have a conversation, and then as soon as they bugger off and leave you in peace again, bang the buds back in.
Active Noise Cancellation
And like a lot of premium true wireless earbuds, The Xiaomi Buds 3T Pro support active noise cancellation to drown out all the noise going on all around you and just leave you to enjoy whatever you’re listening to. To unmolested, you can cycle through the different active noise cancellation modes by long pressing on one of the stems, and different mods are basically active noise cancellation off active noise cancellation auto modes; otherwise, you’ve also got an awareness mode, which does the opposite of anc and just pumps in everything that’s going on around you straight into your locals, which is quite handy. If you are trying to chat with people, you don’t want to be plucking your buds out or whatever.
Now the AC tops off spells, apparently, which is pretty impressive again for budget-friendly earbuds. and certainly does the job, and the dynamic mode you’ll find that does actually boost the noise cancellation when you are in a busy, noisy environment like a high street already reduces the traffic noises and all that kind of stuff. I’ve used it on the tube before, and it actually does a pretty good job of cutting through all of that clamour, making it much easier to just enjoy a podcast without having to bump the volume all the way up.
Whereas you will notice as well when you’re in a quieter environment that the anc just basically shuts off and then that’ll help preserve the battery life, and certainly compared with most other true wireless earbuds that I have tested out with that noise cancellation built in, the Xiaomi buds held up really really well. As I said, it’s perfectly possible to listen to a podcast or an audiobook where you know you’ve just got vocals that you need to sort of concentrate on when you are in a high street or on public transport without having to jack the volume all the way up and then risk damaging your hearing.
Xiaomi Buds 3T Pro Audio Quality and Mic
As far as the Xiaomi Buds 3T Pro audio quality goes, you’ve got 10 mil drivers built into each of these tiny buds, and the audio quality was really good across the full range from the base all the way up to the highs. I found that every little bit of every track was generally well replicated, and the individual instruments and the individual layers came through rather nicely.
If you are a massive bass fan, then you’re probably going to be better saved by something like a pair of Beats buds, but certainly I was happy enough listening to rock metal, a good bit of hip-hop, and dance music, and even just kicking back with a podcast or an audio book, I found that those vocal tones were really rich, nice, crisp, and clear, so again, great stuff. You’ve also got support for dimensional audio here on the Xiaomi Buds 3T Pro as well, so basically 360-degree surround sound audio with full head tracking support as well. and I’ve got to admit that the surround sound activity here is really impressive.
And as for the built-in mics, they also do their job nicely. I actually made some calls when I was riding with my face mask on, and the other person at the other end could still clearly hear everything I was saying, even with the overall noise, the beeping, and the other people’s conversations. Apparently other people’s voices did come through as well, but mine was quite distinct, and there were no issues there at all.
Xiaomi Buds 3T Pro Battery Life
Let’s finish the review of the Xiaomi Buds 3T Pro. With the battery life, you’ll get around six hours of life from these buds per charge, and with the AC off, it’s probably around five to six hours of playback. I found that I had the dynamic encoding turned on most of the time because when I’m out and about, I want to be able to just concentrate on whatever I’m listening to, and it worked absolutely charm, but I did find that the battery life was reduced to around four to five hours, depending on how many noisy environments you end up spending your time in. And also, when I was keeping tabs on the battery life and the Android Bluetooth settings menu, I found that it didn’t trickle down at first. I was really impressed by how slowly it was dropping and that it did speed up quite considerably for the final sort of 50–60 percent, so don’t always rely on that remaining percentage level. So overall, for a pair of true wireless earbuds with AC, the Xiaomi Buds 3T Pro are pretty average when it comes to battery life.
And then when you put them back in the case, you’ll get roughly three full recharges from the case while you’re on the go as well, which is really handy, and again, you know, that’s fairly standard for true wireless earbuds from 2022. and when the case has no battery charge remaining, we can’t just plug them in to get a bit of Type-C action on the go; otherwise, the case itself does actually support wireless charging as well, which is again something that you only tend to find in those more expensive, more premium true wireless earbuds. It was great to see Xiaomi fit it in here. The actual case itself is, uh, perfectly fine as well. It’s got that lovely rounded sort of pebble effect, so it does slip quite easily into pockets and such, not particularly chunky as you can see there, and it seems to be pretty robust as well. A couple of times it’s gone skidding off my desk, flying across the room, usually helped along by a cat or two, just giving a quick flick, and you do have the handy little led at the front there, which just tells you how charged the actual case itself is every time you open it up, so once that goes to red, you know you want to plug it back in or slap it on your wireless charging pad.
Final thought on Xiaomi Buds 3T Pro
The Buds 3T Pro are very impressive premium-style buds; the price will be bowled over by how affordable they are. It’s still kind of a shame you don’t have app support for these buds, who don’t have any direct access to all those shenanigans, but apart from that, it’s really hard to find any proper faults with the Xiaomi Buds 3T Pro they are worth the price.
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Design9
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Setup and Bluetooth8
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Touch Controls7
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ANC7
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Audio Quality8.5
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Battery Life7
