I have been an extremely long-time headphone user. I was very very lucky to get one of the very first Walkman’s when they were a gigantic thing that ate batteries, and I’ve worn headphones ever since.

Everything from audio books through concentration music through to terrible, terrible choices in music, I am very, very audio-based.

However, it has only been fairly recently that headphones have been allowed in the majority of office workplaces. Before that, you had to be working in certain areas or with a certain type of person, and even then, if you failed to communicate normally, it would be frowned on and headphones would be blamed.

Now the world has moved on, and most people use them at work to help with concentration and for the never-ending video calls. and they come in lots of different styles and feature sets, but none seem to be totally perfect for the work environment.

But with the Oladance Pro, I think there is a set that actually match and deal with all of the problems of an office environment.

Problem 1: You can’t hear what’s going on in an office with a pair of headphones on.

Any decent pair of headphones will block out your hearing. Recently, there have been bone-conducting headphones, but their audio quality has always been dreadful when I’ve tried them. These ones don’t do that. They seemingly fire the audio in using part of the top of your ear rather than blocking the ear canal. Which means that your actual ear canals are open. Not only does this mean that you can hear everything around you, But it’s obvious that your ears are not plugged or covered, so your work colleagues know they can talk to you and stuff like that.

Problem 2: Small ear buds never have a proper full day of battery ¹

These have a true full-day battery life; they last for 16 hours, and they do mean 16 hours. So you can put them on in the morning. Go to work with them. Have them on all day. Go home, take them out, and you won’t have any problems. They also have a nice slim battery case, which makes them easy to carry around and charge.

Problem 3: Bluetooth range and behaviour is very dependent on the chipset in the headphones; poor range and poor connectivity issues still plague headphones after all these years.

These ones have solved the main issues that drive me wild:

• Range – The range away from audio sources for these are solid, as good as any of the big over-ear headphones, although at extreme range they can get a tiny bit out of sync with each other till you come back closer.
• Multi Source and Connectivity – being able to connect to 2 sources at once is mandatory in my opinion, especially in a work environment. As well as the ability to swap and recover said connectivity, the Oladance Pro have been improved over the Oladance 2 as they can connect to 2 sources at once, and handle switching between them simply and automatically ², lastly, they auto-reconnect to the sources when you go fully out of range, which is nice.

Downsides

• No serious noise isolation: You can’t really use them on a subway, they are much better than any other open headphones and they have a noise cancelling “Zone” mode which does help ³ but it gets overloaded in massively loud places ⁴.
• You lose your “Do Not Disturb” mode: because they’re so obviously not in your ears. at work you cannot use them to pretend you can’t hear or are deeply engrossed in something; you have to interact with more humans than you are used too.

And finally, a bit of a big one

• Don’t throw away the box. This first release is suffering from some serious hardware failure issues. I’m on my 4th pair, with the previous 3 being returned for a variety of reasons, from refusing to charge to a bright red light that means one side won’t talk to another. The company refunded and replaced them with no problem so it’s not a huge issue but I hope they fix it on the second production run.

None work Upside

This one has little to do with work but was too important to not include. A female friend started using the version 2 earphones and pointed out that it meant she could now listen to music when walking her dog at night; normally she can’t as she can’t take the risk of not hearing an attacker approaching, but headphones like these don’t suffer from that problem, a valuable feature.

Conclusion

All of this together means that other than the very occasional use where I need to block out all external noise, these are now my main and only headphones and rarely leave my ears ⁵ , its an overused phrase and only applies to this latest version but they really are a game changer, if only they can get the reliability up to the same level as the version 2 headphones.

1. and I mean a proper full day, 8-10 hours plus 2-4 hours commute, don’t give me that “30 hours if you keep charging them with a case” rubbish [↩]
2. they do it fast and without loud beeps and notifications[↩]
3. Heaven knows how[↩]
4. This downside is a bit unfair as it is part and parcel of their positive side[↩]
5. I have even forgotten to take them off for a couple of showers and am very grateful they are splash proof[↩]

One of the necessary evils of doing work for corporate clients is that you often have to have in addition to all your own equipment a client’s laptop or PC. This is for obvious security reasons and is just how corporations work, but that does mean that often what is bought out of convenience for the corporation is not best of breed, and in fact, sometimes awful or missing entirely, headsets and decent keyboards are two of the most obvious examples.

Thankfully, while most corporations obviously ban you from installing your own software on their laptops, they have no objection to USB keyboards or the like. This is where programmable media keyboards come in.

Dedicated media keyboards are very useful. Particularly functions like “mic. toggle” and “camera toggle”. but I would not advise you use ones that have dedicated buttons that don’t need drivers, I’ve never had any luck with them as they are either very generic in the functions they trigger or don’t cater to the many different types of conference kit you might use ¹.

So it’s much better to have your own programmable one that you can adjust to any need, but most of the time you are limited by the inability to load the driver software. However, good makes such as Vaydeer get around this. You actually flash the keyboard with the functions you want to use using your own computer, they’re stored permanently on the keyboard and then you can plug them in elsewhere driver free. This means that you can build up exactly what you want the keyboard to do. configure it and set it up on your laptop. Then, disconnect it, plug it straight in to your clients laptop simply as a standard keyboard which works on 99% of them.

As you can see on the above screen shot I have flashed the 2 left buttons on this keyboard with macros that work for Microsoft teams, and they work perfectly, you can also just swap keycaps for media ones, the two on this keyboard were stolen from a cheap dedicated one that didn’t work before I figured this solution out. Obviously, you can do sticky labels or what have you, for any kind of keycaps.

1. ,Microsoft teams, Slack etc etc[↩]