£200 too much of a stretch to buy a pair of Apple Airpods? I’ve been using the Tozo T20 bluetooth headphones for 4 weeks now and for the money they do a lot right. Read on for the full TOZO T20 review of these budget friendly bluetooth headphones.
Summary of Review
Trivelo Score – 4 / 5
For less than £35 you will be happy with the Tozo T20 headphones. Unless you have an issue with a black pair of headphones and can’t accept anything not hospital white they are a good option. Excellent battery life. Reliable connectivity. Solid audio performance for music, speech and phone calls. I would recommend them if only as a back-up given the affordable price.
Pros & Cons
Pros
- Great battery life
- Great price
- Great compact charging case
Cons
- No noise cancellation
- Bass lacks some depth
What you get
In the box you get a pair of black earbuds in a wireless charging case. You also get 6 pairs of ear tips in various sizes (the ones they came with fit just fine in my ears), and a USB charging cable. They charge wirelessly or can adapt to any USB-C cable. I’d prefer a USB-C to USB-C cable nowadays but given they are wireless the cable will be left in the box in my house.
First Impressions
They aren’t winning any design awards but they don’t feel budget. Packaging and details are all well thought through. The design is essentially the first generation airpods reimagined in black. The charging case likewise. What is adds though is the charging LED which I loved. Key feature here is that it provides details on the case and each earbud on the screen. Same functionality you get from Airpods when connecting to an iPhone but rendered on the case. I think it is a great touch and made great impression.
Sound quality
Testing the headphones I pushed them straight into Massive Attacks epic Teardrop. The opening of the song features a drum rim kick as the melody builds. The headphones pick up the vinyl crackle well and cope with the range of inputs.
As the vocals kick in they are clear and well distinguished. It is as the heavy bass is layered in where they struggle. Good separation on the elements of the song but the bass reverbs more than it should and a common challenge for any in-ear headphones. Stereo separation also handled well and the music could noticeably transition between earbuds.
Volume wise they are plenty capable and I tended to keep them below 50% which gave a good representation. Testing them with audio through podcasts and audio books they handled this without any issues.
Taking phone calls
Taking calls the microphone copes with background noise but doesn’t cover cancellation like more expensive headphones. Audio comes through clearly and provided you are in a quiet environment your voice is picked up well by the integrated microphone. Background noise can be an issue so using them on a commute can be a challenge without the intelligence of a more expensive pair of airpods.
Tozo T20 controls
The shoulder of both earbuds contains a touch area to manage the controls through the headphones. You can manage a range of functions using the earbuds but I mainly used them for volume adjustments only. Full list of controls as follows:
- Volume control – Long press the Right bud to increase volume and long press the Left bud to decrease volume.
- Play / Pause music – Single tap on either of earbuds plays or pauses music
- Skip to next song – Double tap on the Right earbud to skip to the next song
- Back to previous song – Double tap the Left earbud to go back to previous song
You can perform various functions if only using a single earbud and they will sense this which is pretty clever in fairness but not something I bothered with during testing.
The earbuds also allow controls to support phone calls that are useful.
- Accept a call – Tap either earbud to accept an incoming call
- Hang up call – Long press on either of the earbuds to end a call (2 secs or longer)
- Reject a call – Double tap on either earbud to reject any incoming call
The TOZO T20 can also engage voice assistance by a triple tap on either earbud. I had mixed success with this while using it. Pace of your triple tap very important here and I clearly didn’t have the nack to this.
Battery life
While the TOZO T20 headphones lack some of the more advanced features of more expensive headphones the battery is monster. There is likely a direct relationship between this. The more whistles and bells you add the harder a battery needs to work. The TOZO’s would last over 8 hours of constant use which is a full working day. You can recharge from the case around 4 times as well so I was easily achieving more than 30 hours each full charge.
The earbuds take around an hour to recharge and the case a couple of hours. What worked well was the headphones going into sleep mode. Some Shokz models I have tested fail to drop into sleep mode and drain the battery over time. The TOZO T20 drops into sleep mode and lasts ages.
The charging case has a physical cable point and comes complete with the cable. I didn’t bother with this and only ever charged them wirelessly. The case make connection quickly to a number of units and charged quickly.
Connectivity
Bluetooth pairing is simple and crucially from testing over a number of weeks reliable. This included pairing to a device that had multiple headphones paired. The bluetooth connection memory was retained and no need to repair.
Running with the TOZO T20 headphones
At Trivelo we are a fitness brand and we review products like these with the purpose of fitness. Therefore I as part of the TOZO T20 review I used them for running both indoors on a treadmill and outside running on pavements and on trails.
Fit of the headphones is good. Comfortable for a longer distance run and they fit snugly with various size surrounds included. I didn’t have any issues stopping to adjust them or worse still having them pop out while running.
Sound quality is good as outlined above and the volume is plenty from the 10mm speakers in each ear. The instruction manual refers to noise cancelling and transparency modes giving a more clear sense of your surroundings. I couldn’t get anything other than native sound. If you want full sound transparency then you need bone conduction headphones such as the Nank runner diver2 headphones or Shokz OpenRun Pro. For transparent sound I would head for Apple Airpods.
