Surface Headphones review: Better than Sony WH-1000XM3 or Bose QC35?

- Okay, so Microsoft is now selling

its own Surface headphones, and I have questions.

Is it worth its $350 price tag,

and can it really stand up

against the best from Bose and Sony?

Today I'll tell you in my full review.

Stay tuned.

(upbeat music)

Alright, when it comes to high-end headphones

on the market, $350 is the price tag for them.

Whether it's Bose, Sony, or these new Surface ones,

and that's because of the active noise cancellation.

Now these headphones, it seems a little weird.

After all, Microsoft is known, so far,

for making a lot of laptops,

but what we were told that these were supposed

to originally launch with say a foldable,

pocketable device that, well, hasn't come to market yet,

so instead we have these.

But there's a lot of good about these headphones,

and I'm actually really surprised

by how good they do stand up against the Sony and Bose,

and at this point, I don't even wanna consider the Bose.

They're just not that good.

Taking a look at the carrying case

that comes with it, it's actually a really nice case.

It's a pretty nice material.

Has the logo on there.

Nice little zipper, and you get a little lanyard strap

there if you wanna attach it to a bag.

It is a hard case too,

so it should protect your headphones.

But I do wanna point out, it's a rather large case.

For instance, here it is compared to Sony's latest,

and while it's obviously way bigger,

it's because the Sonys,

just like the Bose, fold up nicely,

where the Surface headphones don't quite do that.

They just rotate around and lay flat like that,

so it's gonna be a much bigger footprint

for carrying that around,

which is not so good if you travel a lot like I do.

Definitely a negative in my opinion

for the Surface headphones, but it is what it is.

Looking at the top section here,

you do get a nice little net area for storing away cables,

or anything else you wanna carry with this.

A lot of companies put this on the back of the case.

They do it on the inside, which I actually prefer.

Now for the cables,

you do get a 1 1/2 meter USB Type C cable for charging,

or for connecting it for data.

You also do get a 1.2 meter headphone cable,

so if you wanted to do a wire connection,

you can do that as well.

Pretty good size, pretty normal as well.

You do get some directions here at the top as well,

for using these, and we'll talk about that a little bit,

including those new gestures.

Taking a closer look here at the design,

and Microsoft did a beautiful job.

More specifically, there are no visible screws

on this device, and not a lot of seams.

And that's an easy thing to overlook,

but it's actually something you see

on really high-end headphones,

like the Sony 1000XM3's,

which also has a very clean minimalist design

with no screws.

But the Bose, the QC35 Series II,

does have visible screws,

but it's a differentiator, and it's a really nice job

that Microsoft did this on its first try,

creating a very clean and minimalist looking headphones.

Looking at the bottom of the device here,

you can see a few buttons.

We do have a power button,

which you depress once, and it turns on the device.

Press it again, turns it off.

You just do a short press.

A five second hold will go into pairing mode,

and if you hold it down for 20 seconds straight,

well it resets the device to factory defaults.

Now there shouldn't be any issue there

with any firmware updates,

but in case that happens, that's how you would fix it.

There's also a mic button here

that I guess mutes the microphone.

I haven't actually been able to get that to work,

so I'm not really too sure what it does,

but hey, you get an extra button there.

You do have a little LED for charging,

to let you know it's on as well,

and there is a USB Type C, which is really awesome.

So this does have fast charge, which is nice.

It can recharge the entire headphones

about two hours time, but,

even when plugging in for about 10, 15 minutes

will give you around 10% of the battery back,

so, really nice to have.

Super convenient as well.

Plus you do get a standard headphone jack

there on the side, if you wanna do a wire connection

to your phone or a PC,

or you just wanna go without using Bluetooth.

Turning to the cups themselves,

you can see the holes here for the microphones.

Now this one's nice, because it's actually depressed,

which should help, in theory,

with some wind blowing over the device.

This one though is a little bit more exposed,

and from my experience, these are okay in the wind,

but they're not the best.

The Sonys still get better wind reduction

than all the headphones out there,

even compared to Bose, which are probably the worst,

but these are right in the middle.

Pretty nice.

You also get the nice dial here

for controlling volume, so,

it's a really nice module here.

You just slide it and it goes around.

Turns up volume up and down.

You also have touch sensitive panels here,

so this is really kind of the ingenious move here

that Microsoft did with the Surface headphones,

which is, you tap it once and it will pause.

Tap it again, it un-pauses the music.

If you long press, it calls up Cortana,

which is really nice.

You can also do things like double tap

to skip to the next track.

Triple tap to go back.

And you can also answer calls

with a long press if one's coming in as well.

And it works really nice.

Between the ability to control the volume,

just by using the dial, or using the tap gestures,

it's really nice compared to having, say the Bose,

which have dedicated buttons,

which are really hard to find when you're wearing them,

and I prefer this method a lot better.

Now flipping to the left hand side here,

you also get another dial over here,

and this one's for the active noise cancellation,

and again, super cool design.

So, when you're wearing these,

you can just move this dial forward and back.

It'll adjust the noise cancellation,

and it's on a scale, which is nice.

Most headphones, it's either on or off,

or it's like on and high, and on and medium.

This gives you much more granular control,

and it's really nice.

And if you set it to the opposite end of max,

it will actually amplify noise in the room.

Now it's not super hearing,

but it does work pretty well.

Alright, let's talk about some of the differentiators here

with Surface headphones, compared to the Sony and the Bose.

So, if you use Cortana,

and you can save the jokes for later,

but obviously if you're in the United States,

Cortana's actually a really big part of these.

You can almost think of them as Cortana headphones.

From the moment you turn them on,

and you start pairing it up to either your phone

or your PC, well Cortana's there

for the entire experience.

The AI assistant will walk you through

setting up the headphones,

talking about the features and how to use it,

and that's just getting used

to the actual headphones themselves,

but Cortana's also built into the headphones,

or at least kind of whatever device you're connected to.

So whether it's iOS, whether it's Android,

using the Cortana 3.0 app,

or your Windows 10 PC, well,

Cortana is part of the experience.

Hey Cortana.

What is the current weather?

- [Cortana] Right now, it's cloudy and 42 in Worcester.

The forecast shows rain showers,

with a high of 45, and a low of 25.

- So what can you do with it?

Well you can do all sorts of cool stuff, actually.

You can send text messages to people, for instance,

including dictate the entire message,

which is really nice, and send it

without having to look at your phone.

Or you can ask if it's gonna rain on Saturday,

or how to convert pounds to kilograms.

So all of this is part of the experience,

and it's pretty neat, and I should point out here

that it's kind of a big difference,

because if you go with Bose,

well you can only do Alexa or Google Assistant,

or if you have Siri on your phone.

And when it comes to the Sonys,