It goes without saying that I’m aware of that perfectly unpractical way of disabling the ANC.
I use the headset mostly with my computer, and I find the ANC discomforting when there’s no particular noise around (especially since it adds white noise to a silent room).
To disable ANC, around 5-10 times a day, I have to:
- have my phone nearby, requiring it to be charged and turned on
- disable Bluetooth on one of the two computers it is usually paired to
- unlock my phone
- enable Bluetooth & geolocation on the mobile phone (mandatory geolocation is a pain btw, some people don’t care about “find my headset” features)
- often I have to turn off + on the headset because re-appairing the phone doesn’t work half of the time
- hit the home button of my phone to go to the home screen
- search for the Bose Connect icon and click it
- wait for Bose Connect to start and check that Bluetooth & geolocation are enabled
- search for my headset in the Bose Connect list when there are multiple Bose devices around
- swipe down on my headset
- wait
- click on the noise cancellation icon
- click on off
- exit Bose Connect
- disable Bluetooth & geolocation on the phone
- wait for the headset to re-appair to my second computer, which sometimes doesn’t work by itself, so I sometimes have to turn off the headset and start again the whole thing
Time taken: between 20 seconds and two minutes depending on the various delays and appairing fails, requiring a charged phone.
Time taken with an action button shortcut: around one second, requiring nothing.
This is an extremely bad user experience, especially for something that is not particularly supposed to be used with a phone. And from what I read on the forum, I’m far from being the only one that ends up discouraging people to buy the QC 35 I & II just because of this… A shame for just a software issue that we didn’t have with the QC 25.
Thank you,
Bertrand Bordage
