Verum World

Want to Get the Most Battery Life From Your Wireless Earbuds? Here’s How

Technologies

Want to Get the Most Battery Life From Your Wireless Earbuds? Here’s How

Wireless earbuds have more features than ever, but that comes at a cost: power. Here’s how to maximize your battery life.

The saddest sound coming from your wireless earbuds isn’t Billie Eilish’s song, What Was I Made For? It’s the low-battery warning tone, especially when you’ve just sat down for your commute home. After a day of music, calls and the occasional TikTok video (on your break, ahem), can you reasonably expect to have some juice left for the ride home? The answer should be yes. Or it could be, depending on a few things.

Most active noise-canceling, or ANC, wireless earbud manufacturers publish battery life specs with varying degrees of specificity, ranging from basic playback time with and without ANC to a virtual dissertation on battery life using different codecs and features. Some also provide talk-time specifications, but none offer guidance on what to expect from mixed-use scenarios or using all the latest advanced features. So which of those features is depleting your battery the most?

Don’t miss any of our unbiased tech content and lab-based reviews. Add CNET as a preferred Google source.

Real-world battery life

Most common battery drainers:

ANC and transparency modes
Listening volume
Hi-res audio streaming

Less common but potential battery drainers:

Distance between phone and earbuds
Spatial audio processing/head tracking

The average mid- to top-tier earbuds, such as the Apple AirPods Pro, are rated for 8 hours of ANC-powered audio streaming, with some models from Samsung and Bose claiming far less (4 to 5 hours). Talk time with ANC for the AirPods is also less, around 5 to 6 hours. That means if you’re doing a combination of media streaming and phone calls, with many models, you’re looking at about 5 to 7 hours of battery life at best per charge while ANC is on.

The most common battery-draining features are ANC and transparency modes, as well as listening volume and high-resolution audio streaming. These are the places to start squeezing some extra life out of the batteries.

Turn off ANC or transparency, and you’ll see a noticeable increase in listening/talk time. For example, if a spec is 8 hours with ANC on, it’s usually 10 to 12 hours with it off. Other strategies include keeping your volume below 40% (for both battery life and your hearing), and if your earbuds support multiple codecs, choosing a lower-quality one can help. This may not be possible with iPhones, which have more limited codec options compared to Android devices.

There’s also an ever-expanding universe of other power-hungry features out there, including pulse monitoring, fitness tracking, spatial audio, live translation, sound equalization (EQ) and Find My (or the equivalent). These can add up to a death by a thousand cuts for your earbuds’ battery life. You’ll need to take a little tour through various settings to manage all of these, but if you’re running low on juice, you can turn some of them off to avoid being banished to the land of silence.

TL;DR: Turn the volume down, turn off any features you don’t absolutely need and keep your phone nearby.

Fast charging to the rescue

If conserving power by compromising on features isn’t your style, your other option is to take advantage of fast charging via your earbuds’ charging case. Most earbuds offer an extra hour or two from just 3 to 15 minutes of charge time. Hopefully, this will help you finish out your commute or long flight.

Earbud cases generally give you two to four full charges, but what if the case’s battery is low, too? If that happens to you regularly, and assuming wall charging or connecting to your laptop isn’t feasible, consider a small portable power bank. We have recommendations for Android and Apple products. For your next pair of earbuds, some models have cases with enough capacity to charge your phone as well. We like the Anker Soundcore P41i, which has a 3,000-mAh battery in its case.

One last note: To preserve the long-term health of your earbuds’ battery, avoid letting them reach 0% before recharging. Keeping the charge level between 20% and 80% is generally considered best practice for battery longevity over the long term.

Technologies

Samsung S26 Ultra’s Privacy Display Makes Shoulder Surfing a Thing of the Past

You can scroll on the subway in peace.

Picture this: You’re wedged into the middle seat while cruising at 38,000 feet, half watching the clouds and half scrolling through messages you probably should have answered already. The cabin lights are dimmed. The stranger rubbing shoulders next to you adjusts in their seat. Out of the corner of your eye, you notice their gaze flicker toward your screen.

That is a moment when the new Samsung S26 Ultra’s Privacy Display, announced during the company’s Galaxy Unpacked 2026, can quietly step in.

Unlike old-fashioned screen protectors that darken your display permanently, the new feature is built directly into the Galaxy S26 Ultra (starting at $1,300) panel. It is not a film you stick on top; it’s a part of the hardware itself, working seamlessly with the software.

During the Unpacked event, Samsung brought out Miles Franklin from MilesAboveTech to demo the feature: to Miles, looking straight at the screen, everything remained crisp, bright and color-accurate. To anyone trying to peek from the side, like those of us watching the demo, the content fades into shadow. From this perspective, the screen might as well be off.

«It’s seriously one of the coolest features I’ve seen on a phone in years,» Franklin said while onstage at Unpacked.

How Privacy Display works

Under the hood, the technology relies on a combination of directional backlighting and an adaptive pixel layer that controls how light is emitted across angles. Traditional displays spread light broadly so multiple people can see the screen at once. The S26 Ultra does the opposite when privacy mode is active. It funnels light forward in a tighter beam, limiting lateral visibility without sacrificing clarity for the primary user.

Sensors play a role, too. Using the front-facing camera and ambient awareness algorithms, the device can recognize when additional faces appear within viewing range. If it senses someone hovering nearby or glancing from the side, it can automatically trigger enhanced privacy mode. You can also have the process automate when certain notifications pop up or when opening specific apps, like those for banking or social media.

Back on the plane, you can now continue typing. The stranger next to you adjusts again — perhaps curious, perhaps bored. It doesn’t matter. Your screen remains yours.

Technologies

This One Killer Feature Sets the Samsung Galaxy S26 Ultra Apart From All Other Phones

Commentary: Samsung needed to give us a reason to be excited about its latest flagship. It delivered.

There are so many reasons not to buy a new phone in 2026. For starters, our existing phones last longer than ever if we take care of them. Plus, most new phones are way too similar, not only to each other, but to last year’s batch. Finally, most of us won’t have our heads easily turned by yet another AI sales pitch.

But on Wednesday, at Samsung’s Galaxy Unpacked event in San Francisco, the company gave us a genuinely compelling reason to consider upgrading to its new top-end flagship, the Galaxy S26 Ultra. Its killer feature has nothing to do with AI (although Samsung is still beating that drum as loudly as every phone-maker out there).

In fact, it has nothing to do with software at all. Instead, it’s an innovation in hardware: Privacy Display, which offers pixel-level privacy that prevents anyone beside you from seeing what’s on your screen.

Privacy Display works in both portrait and landscape, with the pixels dispersing light in a way that will darken parts of the screen if you’re not looking at it straight on. You can choose whether to apply it to specific apps, to notifications or for when you’re inputting PINs or passwords. Access from Quick Settings makes it easy to turn on and off on the go, like when you suspect someone on the bus is reading over your shoulder, for example.

The reason the Privacy Display is such a compelling feature is that it’s simple to demonstrate, and it offers benefits that are easy to understand, said Ben Wood, CMO and chief analyst at CCS Insight. «Unlike a secondary-market privacy screen protector affixed to the phone’s display, it is not an ‘all or nothing’ solution,» he added.

On the surface, privacy doesn’t feel especially sexy as tech features go. But it is important to people. You only need to observe how central Apple has made privacy to its entire brand to see that people place significant value in technology they feel they can trust.

For Samsung, placing privacy front and center may be a winning strategy, giving its latest flagship a genuine edge over competitors that they can’t match simply by pushing out a software update. Privacy Display also elevates the Ultra even within Samsung’s own wide stable of phones, and it goes some way (although perhaps not all the way) toward justifying that $1,300 price tag.

«At face value, the Galaxy S26 Series devices differ little from [Samsung’s] predecessors launched just over a year ago,» Wood said. «Without this capability, the Galaxy S26 Ultra would have been an extremely tough sell.»

But Samsung may want to capitalize on this competitive advantage while it can. «I also expect this to become a benchmark feature over the next few years on all premium smartphones and other products, such as laptops,» Wood said.

That’s something to look forward to if you plan to upgrade in 2027 or beyond, but for now this is an Ultra exclusive, so you’ll need to be feeling flush if you plan to be a Privacy Display early adopter.