Yellow is the new white ok, in my world it is anyway. So imagine what I thought when I saw the new Nokia Coloud range of Lumia colour matching headphones, I was excited as there are three different headphones to choose from. In the end I went for the Boom headphones which offer comfort, style and hopefully performance. Did they deliver on all three accounts? Well read on to find out.
The review as always will start with my good and bad points about the headphones.
Good Points
- Great looking minimal design headphones
- Handy built in cable tidy
- Decent isolated sound
- Media playback controls in line
- Budget pricing
- Inline controls including microphone
Bad Points
- Lacking deep bass
- Edge detailing a little harsh on the headband
- Inline controls a little fiddly
- Inline controls only partly work on Android and not at all with an Mp3 player
Design
The Coloud Boom headphones are great to look at, albeit a bit simple, minimal almost. Just a mix of colour and black cushioning, I like them though, mainly as they match my Lumia.
Looking at the headphones design let’s start with the cable first, you get an odd looking rubbery sleeve around the headphone jack, this helps to coil the cable up and clip it in place. It’s basically a cable tidy.
The cable itself is flat cable which is tangle free, it’s black to match the cushioning and bares some branding near the ear, alsonear the earpiece is the inline remote, which has one button on it, the button has several uses such as voice activation and playback control.
The ear muffs are fairly comfortable and have an adjustable headband, my head isn’t huge and I had to wear them on max size, so if your head is a bit on the large size you may struggle. After a while my ears did feel a little squashed, I guess this is down to the size, the age of them and my head. The very edge of the headband was a little sharp as well, nothing dangerous just noticeable whilst holding them by the band.
Overall though they look nice and they are nice and lightweight which helps with the slight discomfort I came across.
In Use
The headphones initially seemed quite basic, then I spotted the inline controls, it has one button with many functions. These headphones are designed to work with Nokia Windows Phones so I found the controls didn’t quite function the same on Android as on Windows Phone. Basically one press is for play/pause, two presses is to jump to the next track and three presses jumps back a track and press and hold triggers the voice activation. The only bit that didn’t work on Android was the triple press. It took a little bit of getting used to work out how hard I had to press the button, but once I’d worked it out it was pretty easy.
The cable also has a built in cable tidy
Which is meant to look like this
Similar right? It is a nice feature which works well, you basically just bend the plastic attached to the headphone jack back on itself once you’ve coiled up the loose cable. Which as you can see in my shot above is not the neatest looking. But who cares how neat you coil your cable?
The sound quality of the headphones was pretty good, for the money I wasn’t expecting much. Upon opening them and plugging them into my Lumia I was pleasantly surprised, they sounded good. But when I was listening to something a bit bass driven I was left fiddling with my equalizer controls trying to boost something that just wasn’t there. I did however have more joy using the headphones with my Sony NWZ MP3 player which sounded miles better than my Lumia 1020 or my Nexus 7 (2013), so it could almost be down to the devices not being quite right for each other.
The headphones can also act as a headset, with a microphone on the inline remote. A long press on the button on the remote triggers the Windows Phone voice activation thing allowing you to dial people with your voice. The button also triggers Google Now on my Android device as well, so you could use this to phone on Android too.
Conclusion
The Coloud Boom headphones are a great set of cans, they do seem to fit into the “form over function” category somewhat as the ever so slight niggle of bass response really detracted from a nice package. As an upgrade for the headphones in the box they are miles ahead and for the price they are a great companion to your colourful Nokia Lumia. They are currently available in yellow, cyan or red.
The headphones are available from Mobilefun here for £29.99 along with a range of other Lumia 1020 accessories here