Technology

If you love the idea of Apple's wireless AirPods ($218.00 at Amazon.com) but aren't a fan of the price, the $89 (about £65 and AU$120 converted) Crazybaby Air Nano could be just the thing, although you'll get what you pay for.

What you get is a pair of comfortable wireless earphones that plug into your ear for a secure fit, so you don't have to worry about it falling out while running. The Air Nano also comes with a bunch of different sized ear buds, allowing you to choose the best fit.

Like the AirPods, the pair of Air Nano earphones come with their own charging case, with each pair able to go for three hours on a single charge, while the case holds up to 12 hours of charge time. It also has fast charging -- five minutes gets you one and a half hours of listening time on the earpieces.

The left earpiece has support for voice assistants, so just push down on the button and you can talk to Siri or Google Assistant. The right earpiece controls the playback -- push once to stop, twice to go forward and three times to rewind. You'll still have to manually turn them on when taking them out of the case.

The Air Nano comes with stereo sound and is splash proof as well. But here's what I don't like about the Air Nano, and it might be a deal breaker.

Not all good

The audio quality isn't the best. Compared against the Apple AirPods, the Air Nano feels, well, airy, lacking a soundstage to really feel expansive. It doesn't help that the bass is weak and puny, which means the sound just ends up feeling a little too hollow for my taste.

You'd expect in-ear earphones to sound a lot better, but the AirPods feel like the better wireless listening experience. However, in noisy environments, the Air Nano does have the AirPods beat, as they are in-ear, there's some passive noise isolation at least, but that only serves to illustrate how hollow the acoustics are.

The case and earphone design leave me with some questions, however. For one, you're supposed to wear the earphones with the logo facing upwards, with the speaker facing downwards, but the storage placement of the earphones are reversed, which can be confusing for first timers. It's a small thing, but it really irked me when I first tried out the Air Nano.

Still, for $89, it's a pretty affordable pair of wireless headphones, and if you're fine with its slightly lackluster audio performance, head over to the Indiegogo page, where the Air Nano has raised about $815,000 over its original $50,000 target.

Quick specs

• Available in 10 colors (black, white, red, purple, pink, matte gold, austin yellow, morandi blue, atlantis green, volt green)
• 12 hours battery life on case, 3 hours on earpiece
• Splash proof
• Auto-power off

hether you think Apple's AirPod headphones make you look goofy or not, here's the bigger question: Are they actually good headphones? And are they worth buying versus other "true wireless" models, with separate left and right earpieces, let alone versus "regular" Bluetooth in-ear headphones, those quaint old-fashioned wireless models that connect the two earbuds with an actual cable?

The short answer is that these $159 Apple headphones (£159 in the UK and AU$229 in Australia) are better than you'd expect, especially for owners of Apple products. That general sentiment has led to them being the runaway hit that they are today. It also helps that they're comparably well priced, particularly when you consider that such competitors as the Jaybird Run and Bose SoundSport Free cost more (in the case of the Bose, significantly more).

But if there's one thing I've learned from using them for several months -- and from hearing from other people who've used them -- is that a person's love for them is correlated to the shape of their ears and how securely the AirPods fit inside them. While they fit most people's ears reasonably well, for a certain percentage of users they fit really well. They drop them in their ears and they stay there. For that latter group, AirPods are fantastic.

For others (like me) who have ears that aren't designed to be the perfect AirPod vessels, the experience using them isn't quite as awesome. They're still conveniently compact in their tiny charging case (a new, wireless charging version of that case has been announced and is rumored to arrive soon). And they still sound the same and work just as well. But my love for them is tempered by a niggling fear that they'll fall out of my ears if I try to do too much while using them, like run down a set of stairs in the subway to catch a train. 

That said, I've a grown to like these headphones more over time. Apple has quashed a number of early bugs, including one where the AirPods would cut out during phone conversations on the iPhone 6S (Apple never acknowledged the bug). And with the arrival of iOS 11, you can now double-tap on a bud to advance tracks forward or back (you can assign a few different functions to the double-tap feature for each bud).