You’ve probably heard that the Nokia brand is back in recent years. What you might not know is that the brand now also makes headphones. They have several of them. Their new E3200 Essential True Wireless Earphones, for example, launched earlier this year.
True wireless earphones are quite common place these days. Every major headphones manufacturer has at least one, often several, of them in their product line up. Nokia, with the benefit of a new start, has jumped right into this market with the E3200 that gets the basics right while being very affordable.
The Nokia E3200 has a fairly simple design. The shell has rounded corners with a single capacitive button and an LED indicator in the centre. It is an in-canal style, which means they are designed to fit into your ear canals. With the right-sized silicon tips, the E3200 has fairly good noise isolation.
The smallish size of the Nokia E3200 won’t protrude out of the ears. This makes it very unobtrusive. Also, weighing just 4 grams each side, you might forget that the ultra-light Nokia E3200 earbuds are even in your ears.
The earbuds are IPX5 certified, which means protection from sweat and rain. The Nokia E3200 is ready to accompany you through heavy workouts and bad weather.
The controls are fairly easy to understand. Tap once to play or pause music. Tap trice calls up Goolgle Assistant or Apple’s Siri. The double-tap gesture means different things depending on which earbud you tap: right side will do a skip track, and the left side will turn on or off Ambient Mode.
Ambient Mode allows you to hear your surrounding sounds. When turned on, the earbuds’ microphones pick up surrounding sounds and mixes them into the sound played into your ears.
The sound isolating nature of the earbuds make it inherently hard to hear ambient sounds, so this feature is very useful when you need to hear your surrounding sounds. The sound pick up is very good. Being able to easily turn on and off this feature is convenient, since you can enjoy the quiet isolation, but instantly turn on Ambient Mode to hear your environment without removing the earbuds.
The Nokia E3200 uses 6 mm dynamic drivers with a frequency response range of 20 Hz to 20 kHz. The sound quality is decent, good at the price point of the E3200 sells for.
I found that bass is strong, though the E3200 doesn’t reach the sub-bass. Mids are forward. The highs are a little subdued. Overall, the sound tends to the warm, bassy, profile.
The Nokia E3200 can be used to take calls. Audio quality is good both ways.
The charging case weighs 27 grams. Like the earbuds, the charging case is quite small. The 360 mAh battery in the case adds an extra 12 hours of play time to the earbuds, which on their own gets you 5 hours with the 50 mAh battery in each of them. In total, you get 17 hours of listening pleasure. The charging case is charged via USB Type-C.
The Nokia E3200 supports Bluetooth 5.0, and gets you about 10 metres of line-of-sight range. I did not get any dropouts or connection issues throughout my testing.
Apart from the earbuds and charging case themselves, the Nokia E3200 ships with a USB Type-A to Type-C cable, and three set of silicon tips (one set already on the earbuds).
The Nokia E3200 is available in black (reviewed here), green, and pink.
While the official retail price of the Nokia E3200 is S$129.90, you can get them discounted at S$59.90 from Popular stores island wide.
Summary
The Nokia E3200 is a great true wireless earphones for casual on-the-go use any time. Ambient Mode is very useful when you need to be aware of your surroundings.
Highlights:
- Small, unobtrusive to wear
- Decent sound quality
- Very useful Ambient Mode
- Good battery life