Motorola Moto Buds Plus Review: Bose on a Budget

Verdict

The Moto Buds Plus deliver impressive audio performance with Bose certification, and that’s backed by a stylish design and a smattering of premium features like head tracking and wireless charging. However, the ANC is middling and there’s no iOS support for the companion app, which limits their appeal. 

Introduction

When Motorola first announced a partnership with Bose in 2023, it left plenty of people confused. What could Motorola possibly be doing with an audio manufacturer?

Well, it turns out that Motorola was working on its debut pair of true wireless earbuds, which were finally released in April 2024 in the form of the Moto Buds and Moto Buds Plus. The Plus model boasts not only improved audio performance but other premium features like head-tracked Dolby Atmos and wireless charging alongside that Bose audio certification, all for £129 / $129.

Don’t get me wrong, these aren’t flawless earbuds, with middling ANC performance and a lack of an iOS companion app, but they do offer an impressive audio experience for the mid-range price tag.

Design

• Nice textured matte finish to buds and case
• IP54 dust and water resistance
• Hit-and-miss tap controls

The Moto Buds Plus may not rewrite the true wireless earbud rulebook when it comes to design, but that doesn’t mean these aren’t as fashion-focused as much of Motorola’s recent smartphone collection.

That starts with the case, sporting a rough matte textured finish that stands out from much of the shiny, reflective competition, with the rough finish feeling quite nice in the hand. There’s a Motorola logo, nice and central in a shiny reflective finish, with a matching hinge on the rear, along with a USB-C port for charging and a button to manually activate pairing mode.

The buds themselves match the case, with the same rough textured finish and identical colour as the case – for the most part, anyway. The stems and the panel facing out of your ear are matte, while the parts that come into contact with your skin are nice and smooth. You wouldn’t want sandpaper in your ears, would you?

The buds come with a fairly standard set of small, medium and large eartips in the box, though I found that the medium ones that came pre-attached to the buds fit me just fine. They’re surprisingly stable in the ear too, despite lacking any kind of stability bands to keep the buds locked in place. They were fine for use on the treadmill at the gym, with no need to constantly readjust.   

Controls come in the ever-popular form of taps, with a double-tap pausing the music and a triple-tap skipping to the next track. These can be customised with the Moto Buds app, but more on that in a bit. They work about as well as you’d expect, with a chime to indicate that the tap has been registered, but I’ve found that they’re a bit hit-and-miss in everyday use. 

These aren’t buds that’ll pick up gentle taps, instead having to tap quite forcefully to get the buds to pick up on it. That also means that some taps are missed, even when done in quick succession. I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve tried to skip songs and paused them instead, so much so that I rarely use the tap controls now. It’s just easier to get my phone out of my pocket. 

Feel free to wear these buds to the gym or when it’s raining too, with the buds offering IP54 dust and water resistance while the case gets an IPX4 rating. 

Features

• Support for LHDC and Dolby Atmos Head Tracking
• Moto Buds app for EQ customisation and more
• 5-8 hours of battery life per charge, up to 38 hours in the case

Motorola has gone surprisingly high-end with its connectivity, sporting the same Bluetooth 5.3 support as the Bose QuietComfort Ultra earbuds. Depending on the phone you use, you’ve got a choice between the premium LHDC for lossless audio streaming, alongside AAC and SBC.

There’s also support for Dolby Atmos and Dolby Head Tracking, and the latter is quite rare, especially among sub-£130 earbuds. For reference, it’s a similar feature to the head tracking you’ll find on Apple’s £229 AirPods Pro, essentially tracking the movement of your head while keeping the music locked into position for a more natural listening experience.

The catch is that this isn’t available on every smartphone; it works well with Motorola phones, as you might expect, but even other devices that support regular Dolby Atmos, like the OnePlus Open, can’t make use of the Dolby Head Tracking tech. 

You’ll also enjoy smart features, like support for Google Fast Pair, and this also means the buds will be able to connect to any of your Android devices once set up for the first time. If you’ve got the Moto Buds app installed, you’ll also get a little pop-up with battery life information when you first connect. 

The accompanying Moto Buds app is, rather surprisingly, an Android exclusive that can be downloaded from Google Play, allowing you to enable features like multi-point connectivity and a low latency mode for gaming.

It’s also where you can customise the EQ of the buds if they don’t sound quite right for your tastes, with a range of presets as well as a custom EQ available for the more audio-oriented among us.

I also like that, if you use the Moto Buds with the foldable Motorola Razr 50 or Razr 50 Ultra, you can access the app in widget form via the cover screen. This allows even quicker access to features like ANC mode for when tapping your buds isn’t quite as convenient because, let’s be honest, having to use an app can be a bit of a faff. 

The Moto Buds Plus sport a triple microphone system, first and foremost to enable the ANC and transparency modes of the buds, but they can also be used for calls – and they work surprisingly well. 

I tend not to use in-ear buds for calls, especially when out and about, as they usually let in a lot of environmental noise and pick up on wind easily, but I’ve not had any complaints in any calls recently, even with London buses zooming by as I chat away. 

I’m not saying they’ll be able to quiet construction works going on right next to you, but for the most part, you won’t need to speak any louder than usual when taking calls. 

Battery life is pretty much on par with much of the 2024 wireless earbud competition, managing to squeeze around eight hours of playtime from the buds before they need a top-up from the case, itself holding 38 hours of battery. 

I’ve found that the buds are more than enough for casual music listening throughout the day – though using ANC does bring battery life down to around 4-5 hours in my experience. It’s not a dealbreaker, I find, with fast charging tech that provides about three hours of use out of a quick 10-minute charge, but worth bearing in mind if you want something that’ll just keep on going. 

There’s also wireless charging capabilities for added convenience, and that’s not something you always see in this price segment. 

Sound Quality

• Sound By Bose certification
• Impressive all-round audio performance for the price tag
• ANC performance doesn’t match, letting in a lot of sound

The Moto Buds Plus features Sound By Bose certification as part of an ongoing partnership between the two companies, so it’s safe to say that the buds sound pretty incredible, especially for the price. 

Powered by dual dynamic drivers comprised of 11mm woofers and 6mm tweeters, the Moto Buds Plus deliver a fantastic all-round experience that’s well suited to both music and podcasts, with a healthy balance between the lows, mids and highs you don’t usually see in mid-range TWS buds – on the flat EQ, anyway. 

Bass performance is easily the highlight for me. Low tones are present and powerful without drowning out the mids, with great separation even in the bassiest of Dubstep tracks like Mushroom Cloud’s Dracula Flow which makes them a real treat for bass heads that don’t want to go down the over-ear headphone route – especially with the Bass Booster EQ at play. 

Even without particularly bass-heavy tracks like Sabrina Carpenter’s Espresso, the buds showcase just how well they can handle different levels with a clear, defined bassline, a multitude of synths and clear vocals, without sounding muddy and crowded. 

On the other end of the spectrum, Hans Zimmer’s Interstellar theme sounds absolutely incredible on the Moto Buds Plus. They deliver a wide soundstage that really immersed me in the orchestral magic of the track, with crisp, bright highs and plenty of detail that also translated well to podcasts. 

These are easily my favourite buds for listening to music, especially if you’re using a phone with LHDC support and have access to a high-res music library. 

It’s safe to say that the sound experience is a top-notch one, then, but how does it fare in the ANC department? I’d love to be able to tell you that the ANC capabilities of the buds match their top-end audio performance, but despite the Bose certification, I feel it falls short of what you can find from competing TWS buds. 

Sure, the combination of three microphones and Motorola’s algorithms does result in a quieting of the environment, but even with the volume turned up quite high, you’ll still notice bits of the environment leaking in – especially higher-pitched tones like the screech of the London Underground. 

In fact, there were segments of my commute that I really struggled to hear the music I was listening to, so much so that I had to verify that the buds weren’t set to their alternate Hybrid or Transparent modes. That wasn’t the case. 

It’s not just in exceptionally loud environments either; even at the gym, I could still clearly hear the fan that was working overtime to extract the hot air from within the building. 

It also sounds like the ANC can get confused at times, letting in sounds that it shouldn’t for a few seconds before quietening them again. It can get quite jarring at times, and I hope it’s fixed via firmware update sooner rather than later. 

It’s not to say that it can’t do anything; the ANC can take the edge off when walking down a relatively busy street, and it can quieten the hum-drum background noise when shopping, but it’s not a pair of earbuds that you’ll put in and simply forget about the world around you.

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