As notifications come in, you'll hear prompts from Assistant about which app has sent them. Siri can still be triggered by holding down the Play/Pause button. When the headphones are connected to your iPhone, Assistant will detect that you have a compatible headset and will walk you through a quick setup process.
We tested the QC35 II with an Apple iPhone 6s Plus and a Google Pixel 2 XL ( Review). If you're using iOS, you'll need the Google Assitant app installed and set up with a Google account. Pairing is quick if you have an NFC-capable smartphone, but the old-fashioned way works too. Bose QC35 II performance and battery life The Music Share feature lets you share the audio with another person who has compatible Bose headphones.
The Bose Connect app lets you give your headhones a quirky name, manage the pairing list, automatically update their firmware, and set a sleep timer. There's support for the AAC audio streaming codec too. The QC35 II can remember up to eight paired devices and can be connected to two of them at the same time. The bundle also includes a hard carry case and a Micro-USB charging cable, but there's no airline adapter like the one that came with the original model. The box contains a 2.5mm to 3.5mm stereo cable, but ideally, we would have preferred a standard 3.5mm socket on the headphones. The headphones charge through a Micro-USB port on the right ear cup while the left one has a 2.5mm audio input for a wired connection.
The same goes for the cushioning on the inside of the headband.īutton placement is the same as on the QC35, except for a new Action button on the left ear cup which is used to activate Google Assistant or to cycle through the different levels of noise cancellation, depending on what you choose in the Bose Connect app, which is available for both Android and iOS. The ear cups are made up of a plush synthetic leather and feel extremely comfortable on your ears. They swivel outwards so that they can lie flat against your upper body when placed around your neck (although this is still a large pair of headphones). The ear cups have a decent amount of clamping force and cover your entire ear when you wear them. We used it for a couple of weeks, even through long commutes of over an hour, and we didn't feel any sort of fatigue. The QC35 II is extremely comfortable to wear. The fit and finish is good and we didn't feel any creaks in the plastics during use. The headband has a metal lining on the inside too, so there's good support for the ear cups. The headphones are very light at just 240g because quite a bit of plastic has been used in the construction, though the outer portions of the ear cups use stainless steel.
We got the silver version for review but you can also buy it in black.
Note: This software patch is not compatible with Bose’s newest noise-canceling headphones, the Headphones 700 ($399), which use a different app (Bose Music instead of Bose Connect) and have not had issues with their noise-canceling abilities.The look and feel of the QC35 II is pretty much exactly the same as that of the QC35. And while a good temporary fix, it might reasonably make you a little skittish about downloading the next update. This is the first time that Bose has ever allowed users to revert back to an older firmware.
In a forum on Bose’s website, the company states: “Today, we’re re-introducing the ability to downgrade firmware QC35 II to 4.3.6 and QC35 series 1 to 2.5.5 via the Bose BTU site for a limited time.” If you’re somebody who wants to take advantage of the older firmware, you have a limited time to do so. The company just published a summary of its own internal investigations regarding peoples’ complaints, and while it claims that they’re “confident that firmware 4.5.2 did not affect the noise cancelling feature,” it’s actually giving users the option to revert back to an older firmware. And, in what is a pretty unprecedented event, Bose is letting users roll back their updates. Many users have complained that recent software updates have made the noise-canceling abilities significantly worse. If you own a pair of Bose’s QuietComfort 35 (Series I or II) noise-canceling headphones, the past few months may have been frustrating time.