JBL just delivered a major upgrade with its Tour Pro 3 earbuds with over 15 feature additions, one of which solves my top travel pet peeve.
The Tour Pro 3 earbuds have been redesigned from the case up to include more quality-of-life improvements than you could ask for, from a smart charging case, hybrid dual-driver sound with spatial 360-degree and head-tracking, adaptive noise canceling, up to 44 hours of music playback, plus six mics for perfect sound on calls, and a wireless audio transmitter for in-flight entertainment.
While the jam-packed features list is certainly worth being excited about, it's the tweaks to travel connectivity that have caught my attention. As the Tour Pro 3 doubles as an audio transmitter, it allows users to wirelessly connect to in-flight entertainment without buying a separate dongle, making it easier to use your personal earbuds in the air.
Travel woes no more
As a journalist and scuba instructor, I spend a lot of my life on flights, and while I've found plenty of ways to pass the time while hurtling through the troposphere in a metal tube with wings, some of the changes to in-flight entertainment on domestic airlines have come to be a major annoyance.
If airlines even bother to give you a screen in the seatback in front of you, they often run out of headphones or don't hand them out. As a person with an Apple iPhone 14 Pro, I can't use my standard wired earbuds because they have a lightning connection rather than a 3.5mm audio jack. And I often forget to bring headphones with a standard audio jack because why waste the suitcase space? And while I do travel with Bluetooth earbuds, for all that I do enjoy my old Powerbeats Pro buds, they're a bit outdated compared to the best earbuds out there. So, they often fail to pair properly with the seatback entertainment systems.
While this is hardly a devastating problem, it's a personal pet peeve, and what good is modern tech if it can't solve that type of problem?
The JBL Tour Pro 3 will be available on September 22 for $299. That's a $50 increase over its predecessors, but given the massive infusion of new features, it feels justified.
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