Interval In-Ear Swim Headphones for Apple Watch

This is the only option for listening to Audiobooks (Audible) while you swim. Audible requires a registered device and there are no waterproof devices any more. Several years ago, I bought the AudioFlood waterproof iPod Nano. Last year, it finally gave up the ghost. So, the only option is to use a Bluetooth device with the Apple Watch. I find I swim longer when I am caught up in a good book.I bought the H2O Interval and loved them. After almost a year, the earbuds started to crackle became barely audible. I contacted support at H2O Audo hoping to get them repaired.The people were very helpful and pointed out that they were still under warranty. During my conversations with them, I mentioned that I wear hearing aids (Old guy swimming for 60 years) and if they needed to be replaced them, I would probably buy the newer bone conducting option.I returned them on RMA. They came back a week later and... They sent the bone conduction version! Wow! Better than ever!Observation: The wires connecting the bone conduction speakers are heavier and appear to be sturdy and more durable.At first, there was some concern because the sound was a little fuzzy when held by my goggle strap. As soon as my head went under the water, the sound quality was great. My theory is that with my head out of the water, the goggle straps don't hold them securely against the bone so they vibrate on both inner and outer surfaces. Once in the water, the water acts a backup to dampen the reflected vibration.The apple watch will not track laps while it is not on your wrist (bummer). H2O Audio now has a "My Swim Tracker" app you can download so you can count laps while swimming and listening to books.Summary: 1. Great product. 2. Tech support is helpful and amazing. 3. Get the app.

Sound started cutting out 10 minutes into my first swim with this thing. Plastic is cheap, feels like it cost maybe $12 to produce this thing.. Sound is actually decent prior to jumping in the water. But water is water and it will find a way interrupt your audio experience when bluetooth signals try to penetrate water, and even if the signal is strong enough, water is water and will eventually find a way into your earbud & ear canal. Tech is clearly not there yet. The best swim experience is to just have a quiet moment in the water WITHOUT audio gadgets; get yourself some Doc's Proplugs, a nice swim cap & goggles AND LEAVE YOUR APPLE WATCH ON YOUR WRIST DURING YOUR LAP SWIM. The poor man's (or savvy saver's) way of getting tunes in the water is to just stuff your apple watch under your swim cap and get a cheap IPX8 bluetooth headset and forget the $110 plastic configuration sold here. What a joke. Maybe it's worth $20, max. If that.

Its difficult to review an item when there aren't really any other in direct comparison to it. Sure, there's a whole swath of waterproof and swimming music choices, but there are no other that use an Apple Watch as its main source of audio (at least at time of this review). Generally speaking, you have your choice of a .00001 cent MP3 player from 1999 encased in plastic that you have to drag files onto like you're on the family computer at 9PM in the early 2000s - nervously wondering if that download from Limewire is 'actually' going to be NSYNC's latest album or something more nefarious. Alternative to that being the exact same MP3 player but this time wedged into the earpiece of a bone conducting headphone, complete with a horribly outdated proprietary USB A cable that provides the convenience of super slow charging + file transfers at a whopping 45kb/s.These headphones - while being lightyears ahead of most of the competition do have their drawbacks amongst their strengths. For this review I'm going to be sticking with the wired 'earbud' version, and not the bone conducting flavor, for reasons I'll describe later.Form wise, they're fine. They grip your Apple Watch snugly, they fit onto the straps of most goggles without much hassle, and they're contoured on the back to seat perfectly against the gentle curve of a homosapian skull. I have had my Apple Watch fall out once before, but I can attribute that to user error - because I was trying to fiddle with it while it was on the back of my head like Robocop trying to remove his brain inhibitor and it popped out and dropped connection while in the pool. Not a big concern. What is however more of a regular annoyance is putting the thing on at the start of my swim. about 4 out of 10 times its small plastic inserts that allow for a goggle strap to slide through works in reverse, and lets my goggles slip right out of it. I have tied a small piece of elastic around those connections so that my goggles don't do it anymore, but I think that depending on what goggles you have (I use the Speedo Vanquishers just in case you wanted to know) you may have thinner straps that just don't 'strap-on' so to speak.Battery life is good. No complaints. It'll outlast your Apple Watch 1000x over, but when you do have to charge it, it is annoying that you now have two separate things to charge instead of one. Additionally the proprietary charger (which I understand, you can't just put a USB port onto something that gets dunked into the water) sucks and is insanely easy to lose, which good luck finding a replacement. I suggest you superglue that thing into an outlet and never remove it just to be sure.The bluetooth connection is rock solid - with one MAJOR exception. I, like most millennials, am impatient and just can't spare the extra 30 seconds of waiting time because I have avocado toasts to devour and jobs to hop. Once you turn on the device (after the initial pairing setup), do NOT fiddle with ANYTHING for like...a minute or two. The more you fiddle with it, the slower and more painful the process is going to be to get it going. I think it takes that time to actually boot up whatever little tiny logic board its got in there and establish an actual bluetooth connection, and even though the device itself may say 'pairing' in that uncomfortable female robotic voice, she is NOT ready to pair until you've paid the time tax. I almost returned this device thinking it was dysfunctional because every time I turned it on, I expected it to start and pair as quickly as my AirPods or whatever, and instead was met with my music being stuttery, laggy, and intermittently disconnecting. This is a little tiny poor device, made out of cobbled Chinese grab bag assorted bits and bobs doing its very best to get you bluetooth. Just give it a minute once you turn it on before actually trying to start your music on your Apple Watch. Once it actually establishes connection it's there for good, and you won't have any problems.Music quality is where there is a STARK difference between the earbuds and the bone conducting. I've had both, and there aren't many pros to the bone conducting ones. The only reason I could see for one choosing the bone conducting is if you have wimpy baby ears made of tissue paper skin. The earbuds are sliiiiiightly more uncomfortable to wear, but have infinitely better audio quality, weigh less, are easier to finagle, don't flop around, and you look ever so slightly less like a dork wearing it than the bone conducting ones. Seriously, get the in ear ones, they come with like 8 different ear tips that you can swap out, so you can more than likely find one that works for you if the stock ones are too uncomfortable.These guys do work, and I appreciate that the connection from my Apple Watch lets me not have to download a bunch of random crap music to listen to with a bad USB cable. I can just let my swimming playlist on Apple Music auto sync to my watch and it's there for me, updated and unique every single time I swim. I swim a lot, and these do help with the monotony, and the drawback for having this luxury is minimal with this device. Yes, you look like a fart wearing these in the lap pool - but I will die on this hill that swimming headphones are worth it. I also think that for $100 it's well worth it in build quality, as I've tormented my set for a while now and its still running strong.

Reasonable price and works very well.This is the third one I have purchased. I swim a mile 5 days a week, so it gets heavy use. The first one lasted longer than I expected. The rubber seal eventually failed on the on-off switch. The second one failed at two months, with one earbud failing to function. I think it was fine, but be careful handling the device as it may be delicate. I have tried them all, and this device is as good as I have found, so I ordered a third. Avoid the Delphine. I had two of those, and they were devilishly hard to use and failed within a few months of use.