Urbanista launches wireless earbuds that are powered by the sun

They offer up an essentially infinite amount of battery life and feature active noise cancellation

(Urbanista)

A year after launching the world’s first self-charging solar-powered wireless headphones, Swedish audio brand Urbanista has gone one step further, today announcing the Urbanista Phoenix, a pair of wireless earbuds that charge using the power of light.

Promising to deliver a practically limitless battery life, the charging case of the earbuds will start to charge whenever it’s exposed to any indoor or outdoor light source. That does mean that the earbuds themselves can’t charge themselves independent of the case, but it should remove the need to juice up a charging case entirely.

(Urbanista)

The company says that the earbuds get eight hours of playback after a full charge inside the case, with the case itself holding 32 hours of battery. The AirPods Pro charging case, by comparison, holds up to 24 hours of battery, but still needs to be plugged in again once it’s run out.

As with Urbanista’s Los Angeles headphones, the Urbanista Phoenix have been designed in partnership with Exeger, who has developed the Powerfoyle solar cell material found on the charging case, responsible for keeping the battery juiced up.

In our review of the Los Angeles headphones, our writer said that “the scarcely believable battery life is, in fact, just what you get,” and that the “Powerfoyle keeps everything topped up”.

On top of the self-charging smarts, the Urbanista Phoenix feature active noise cancellation; a transparency mode, which lets in the ambient sound; and in-ear detection so that your music pauses automatically when you take it out of your ears and turn off by themselves when not in use.

They also support multipoint connectivity, allowing you to pair them to two devices at once, feature touch controls and work with your native voice assistant. They’ve got an IPX4 splash-proof rating and contain a USB-C charging port for traditional power.

The Urbanista Phoenix are expected to be released in the fourth quarter of 2022, and will come in midnight black and desert rose colours.