What’s more, there are no signs of battery life in the app. Like the Eargo 7, the Eargo 8 claims to have impressive runtime (and in slightly larger carry cases it takes 224 hours of charging time), but you can’t tell you where you are until the battery is close to the empty one. The good news is that it is difficult to run out of 16 hours at a time. In my tests, I could only drain the battery fully by excluding AIDS from the shell overnight.
If the software
Photo: eargo
I (twice before) complained about Eargo’s rock audiogram training system, which uses ultrasonic signals from the phone to communicate with the hearing aids instead of Bluetooth (like Bluetooth). It keeps hearing aids small because they don’t require a Bluetooth radio to work. Eargo is not unique in using the technology, but its implementation remains even after a few years on the market.
My training took nearly half an hour because the hearing aids missed most of the ultrasound signals, which prevented them from making tone to my ears when they should. This is a big problem because you don’t tell if you can’t hear the tone because of deafness or hearing aids that fail to register the signal correctly. I found this training more frustrating than ever.
The technology is also used to control AIDS by applying commands. Although if the volume changes are missed and you have to send the request again, it is still a pain (especially one hearing aid gets the signal while the other does not), which is not that big. This also means you can’t use these assistive tools to stream over Bluetooth, which is bigger than ever before. At this point, even if it means selling larger equipment, it may be time for eargo to explore something more reliable.
These units support physical double-clicks on the ear, but only switch in three environment programs you can choose in the application. These faucets were reliably registered in my tests, although I didn’t notice that the differences between the various modes were too large.
AIDS is very comfortable, partly because they are very small in weight, although the Eargo’s ear tips are a little comfortable on the itchy side. After several hours of wear and tear, I always had to remove them to give my ears some time to recover. (Strangely, only three pairs of ear tips are included: small, medium and large vents.)
The eargo 8 assistive tools aren’t cheap, and now costs $2,699 per pair. (The Eargo 7 AIDS is now priced at $2,399.) While Eargo products have always been expensive, in today’s market, nearly $3,000 asking prices put these aids almost on the prescription pricing territory, which is hard to justify. The Eargo 8 assistive device is still excellent in audio quality and is perfect in small size, but given that the same great over-the-counter competitors can be used for fewer excellent competitors, the upgrade here is simply not worth the price.
