New earbuds are designed for fitness fanatics

The Jabra Sport Pulse special edition Bluetooth 4.0 headphones ($159.99) are do-it-all when it comes to earbud features.

They are touted as the world’s first sports headphones with automatic fitness technology. The health-related features include a built-in heart rate monitor and automatic VO2 max tracking, a scientific way to measure your absolute fitness. This includes tracking the maximum rate of oxygen your body consumes during exercise.

It’s critical that sports earbuds stay in place during a workout and the Sport Pulse delivers several sizes of ear tips to ensure a secure fit.

The sound is great and includes passive noise cancellation, which helps eliminate surrounding noise.

I used the lightweight earbuds while mowing the lawn and gardening, and they stayed in place the entire time, unlike many other sport earbuds I’ve used for the same chores.

The Jabra fitness app works with the sport earbuds to track your performance and coaches you with in-ear feedback during the workout. Distance, speed, pace and time are all recorded within the app.

The batteries lasted the entire afternoon of mowing and gardening before a USB charge was needed. Bluetooth 4.0 lets users connect up to eight devices to the earbuds.

More: Jabra.com

WIRELESS SPEAKER

The Altec Lansing Mini Life Jacket 3 Bluetooth wireless speaker ($99.99) didn’t accompany me during my afternoon and lawn and gardening like the Jabra Sport Pulse headphones, but they do float in your pool while pumping out great sound.

With an IP67 certification, the rugged speaker floats in water and is sandproof, dustproof, dirtproof and shockproof. Users can pair two Mini Life speakers for stereo sound and charge another USB device with the built-in charging port while the speaker plays music.

The powerful sounds comes from a pair of neodymium drivers and a passive radiator behind a black speaker grill. The sound has a nice amount of bass and sounded great in and out of the water.

You can use the speaker for handsfree calls and 16 hours of sound before a USB charge is needed. A universal accessory mount is included for mounting the speaker on a bicycle, lounge chair, etc., and there’s a aux port for a 3.5-mm wired device connection.

More: alteclansing.com

SMARTPHONE CASE

Smartphone cases bore me unless there’s a cool feature worth mentioning, which is the case with the Wally Ether wallet from Distil Union ($34.99).

The iPhone 7 and 7 Plus case is built with a slim hard shell crystal-clear polycarbonate frame and a hidden card-carrying compartment built on the leather backside that can store credit cards or cash.

Use a pull-tab to access the contents of the wallet; when the credit cards or cash are pushed into the thin compartment, the tab retracts.

A microfiber cloth lines the inside frame to protect the phone from scratches and there are cutouts for the camera, speakers and charging lightning port.

More: distilunion.com

This story was originally published April 5, 2017 at 12:46 PM with the headline "New earbuds are designed for fitness fanatics."