Apple’s AirPods Pro are incredibly popular, so popular that Oppo thought fuck it – let’s make our own that looks almost identical! The result of that is the Oppo Enco W51.
For $185 (available direct from Oppo’s Amazon AU store), you get two white sticks that jam into your ears, along with a white clamshell case that has a battery in it so you can charge. The case accepts USB-C or can be charged wirelessly with any Qi charger.
Pairing them is hilarious if you’ve ever used the AirPods – Oppo ripped off the pairing UI pretty hard. No shame!
I hate in-ear headphones and these are in-ear headphones. They feel as weird and uncomfortable in my tiny little ear canals as any other in-ear headphones have. You get a choice of tip sizes in the box.
The W51’s sound good. As usual, I’m not an audiophile but I would happily listen to these things for music and podcasts. Quite nice bass considering how small these things are. I used them for a few phone calls and people didn’t complain about hearing me, so props there too.
Noise cancelling works well. My study is close to the laundry in my house and they drowned out the drone of a washer and dryer with ease, but still let through the beeps when the washing was ready to take out of the machine. Is it Bose levels of noise cancelling? It’s been a while since I used a pair of QC35’s in anger, but I don’t remember them being any better than these.
Battery life is reported as 3.5 hours with the noise cancelling on for the WC51 and in my testing that seems legit, got around 3 hours or so before I had to pop them back in the case. Not as good as the AirPods Pro which get around 4.5-5hrs.
Can use them in single bud mode if you’re on the phone or want more ambient noise. They’re IP54 rated so you can get all sweaty and not worry about damage. Configurable single, double and triple tap gestures for various stuff (play/pause, Google Assistant, etc). Doesn’t support aptX, or any of the higher quality codecs, just SBC and AAC.
Umm, that’s it I think? They’re solid little units for $199 – you can find them even cheaper sometimes on sale. For under $200 I don’t know if you’d find a better overall set of in-ear wireless buds with noise cancelling than the Oppo Enco W51.