Motorola unveiled one of their largest new ranges in Australia last month, showing off new phones and wearables including new moto buds 2 and moto buds 2 plus. 

The Moto Buds 2 are aimed at everyday use, while the moto buds 2 plus focusing on premium audio. The buds 2 plus feature advanced Active Noise Cancellation (ANC), as well as Sound by Bose bringing improved depth of sound and detail. 

Priced at $159 RRP, the moto buds 2 plus come in two Pantone colour options: Bright White and Silhouette, with Motorola sending over the Bright White option for review. 

The availability of the buds is limited, with Telstra the only current stockist, but they’re avaialble now, and I’ve spent the last couple of weeks with the moto buds 2 plus, and here’s how it went. 

The moto buds 2 plus are your typical ‘stalk’ style Totally Wireless Stereo (TWS) earbuds, with the driver fitting into your ear leaving a stem trailing down. 

The stem offers touch – or, more accurately ‘pinch’ controls on the stem, with a number of options to control both calls, as well as your audio – which you can configure in the Moto Buds app.  The contrtols can be a little finnicky, but you get used to it.

The app is only available for Android though, leaving iOS users with no customisation options including Equaliser and preset tuning, setting up Dual Device Audio so you can pair with phone and laptop, but they will pair to iOS as basic TWS earbuds.  

You do still get in-ear detection, so you can pull them out of your ears to stop playing, and replace them to start again.

Other options in the app include a Fit Test, the option to ring the buds if you lose one, and of course firmware updating. 

The buds come in two colour choices: PANTONE Bright White and PANTONE Silhouette, with motorola sending over their Bright White model for review. 

The buds come in a charging case which both protects the buds and charges them when not in use. The charging case extends use up to a total of fourty hours – with the buds capable of holding 9 hours of charge giving you a fairly impressive session time.

The buds can be charged via USB-C port in the bottom of the case – but you’ll need to supply your own charging cable as there’s none included in the box.

I still haven’t worked through the full charge after a couple weeks of use, so they have decent longevity – and stand-by time.

Both the buds and the charging case come with an IP rating – IP54 on the buds, which is good enough for sweat from a hard workout, or if you get caught in a rain shower – but not designed to go swimming, while the charging case gets a mere IPX2 rating letting them survive a ‘drip’ at 15° angle. 

The buds themselves are fairly comfortable to use, I walked around for three hours listening to podcasts and had could have easily kept going. 

They stay in well, surviving a cross-trainer and bike ride without slipping. They come with what appears to be a mid-sized ear tip, but if you have different ear canal sizes you may have issues as there’s no spare ear tips included in the box. 

The moto buds 2 plus include 11mm drivers with ‘Sound by Bose’ tuning. Motorola says the moto buds 2 plus provide ‘full-bodied bass, while balanced armatures from Knowles add clarity and precision’ – and in practice they’re very good with great sound quality across the board. 

You don’t get some ‘deep’ bass simply due to the size of the driver, but mids and highs sound good – and actually sound better than their $159 RRP would have you believe.

What you do get is an EQ with a number of pre-sets you can choose from in the app including Brilliant Treble, Flat, Vocal Boost and Bass Boost – as well as a custom EQ.

The Dynamic ANC  on board has also been tuned by Bose engineers letting the buds use the 6-microphones (3 on each bud) to dynamically adjust automatically to your environment, cancelling loud sounds on the fly. 

In practice, the ANC is good, though doesn’t quite drown out train and aeroplane noise (prop-jet between Canberra and Sydney) but do reduce it enough that it becomes less of a distraction.

The Transparency Mode works quite well, letting you keep the buds in while still experiencing ANC and getting to hear when someone is talking to you without any of the delay you sometimes get in cheaper TWS buds.

Final Thoughts

The motorola buds 2 plus are a little more premium in terms of sound thanks to the ‘Sound by Bose’ tuning. It’s still not quite the level of over-ear headphones, but for their size they impress.

There are certainly more impressive buds available from Sony and even Bose themselves, but you will pay a lot more for those options. For $159 the Moto Buds 2 Plus are jam packed with features like Dual Device, Dynamic Active Noise Cancellation and they come with a long battery life making it a hard option to go past when weighing up value for money and quality.

You can check the moto buds 2 plus out on the motorola website, or head over to Telstra to grab yourself a pair now.