Love the sound, hate the noise

The Moto Buds+ may come from Motorola (the clue’s in the name), but the biggest reason to buy them is another company’s involvement. Motorola recruited Bose to tune the sonics in their latest midrange earbuds, making these a relatively affordable way to get Bose buds, albeit without the branding. But is that audio assistance enough to make these buds worth buying, or does Motorola have more work to do?

Price and availability

A bargain for Bose

The Moto Buds+ are available now from the Motorola website for $130, and at the time of writing, that’s the only place you can find them. That price makes these Motorola’s most premium pair of earbuds, but by Bose standards, they’re a bargain — the cheapest new Bose buds are $299, more than twice the price.

What’s good about the Moto Buds+?

The Bose bits

Let’s get straight to it: the Buds+ generally sound pretty great. No, these won’t sound as good as Bose’s $300 flagships, but you shouldn’t really have expected that. But for $130, I’ve been impressed by the audio delivered by the dual dynamic drivers.

Bass response is strong and bouncy, driving low-end-led Charli XCX songs like it’s nothing. But there’s a crisp, clean quality to the tuning that makes these just as suitable to the twinkly twangs of Khruangbin or vocal-heavy pop like that Sabrina Carpenter song that pops up in every Spotify shuffle. These really are some of the best-sounding buds out there at this price.

There’s also support for high-resolution audio and even Dolby Atmos spatial audio, complete with head-tracking, though this latter feature requires you to use the buds together with a compatible Motorola phone.

The accompanying Moto Buds app has an EQ with four presets: flat, extra treble, extra bass, or a ‘vocal boost’ that both drops the bass and boosts the high notes. I’ve been happy enough with the flat EQ, but if you want to play around more, there’s a full manual EQ, too — not a guarantee around this price.

The rest of the app is basic but easy enough to use. You can activate a lower latency gaming mode, check the battery level, and tweak your settings for active noise cancellation (ANC) and the touch controls — more on both of those later.

You also get the option to enable another of Buds+’s better features: a dual connection mode, which allows simultaneous pairing of two devices, such as your phone and your laptop. That’s nothing groundbreaking, but again, it’s welcome to see at this price.

I’ve also mostly been impressed by the battery life. Bose predicts up to 38 hours from the case and eight hours on the buds at a time. I’ve definitely had shorter runtimes than that, though that’s with near-constant use of the ANC. You can find longer-lasting earbuds out there, though not by so much that I’d consider it a real con.

Finally, while I wouldn’t say the earbuds’ design is a standout feature, there’s a sleek simplicity to it, especially the flat and compact charging case. The case can be charged wirelessly, another big plus, and the buds themselves are water-repellent enough to survive a little rain or sweat.

What’s bad about the Moto Buds+?

Sounds great when you can hear it

Remember how I said the Buds+ sound great? Well, they do… so long as you’re somewhere quiet. Motorola says that Bose helped tune and certify both the EQ and the ANC, but one has come out of it much better than the other.

These simply don’t do a great job of blocking external noise unless it’s relatively low-level anyway. Quiet chatter in a cafe is mostly tuned out, but the ANC does next to nothing for the music blaring in my gym, the rattle of the London Underground, or even just the standard traffic noise when I’m walking down the street. I’ve repeatedly found myself turning the ANC off and on just to confirm that it was actually working, which is never a good sign.

For times when you don’t want ANC anyway, there’s an Aware mode that amplifies outside noise and an Adaptive mode that switches between the two automatically.

My other bugbear is the buds’ touch controls. There are no physical buttons here, so all the controls are handled by tapping on the spot where the stem joins with the body. I have found this… fiddly, at best. The correct spot is small, and not on the point that seems intuitive – the corner of the stem – but actually a little further down.

Even after two weeks of daily use, I cannot get this right. I routinely tap the wrong part of the bud, wait a second to confirm my music hasn’t paused, then try again and hopefully get it right. I’ve used worse earbud touch controls, but I’ve also used much better.

Should you buy them?

If you’re in the market for true wireless earbuds and don’t have a few hundred bucks to spend, the Moto Buds+ should be in contention — but only if ANC isn’t a priority for you.

If you expect to use them in relatively quiet spots then you’ll enjoy the excellent audio tuning, selection of premium features, and easy-to-use app. But if you need earbuds for a noisy commute, loud workouts, or simply tend to walk along busy roads in a major city and want to tune it all out, then I’d recommend giving these a pass and looking at some of the earbuds we recommend specifically for their great ANC performance.