Urbanista is revamping its line of solar-charged headphones with the announcement of second-generation versions of its Los Angeles over-ear headphones and its Phoenix true wireless headphones. Both products are still built with Exeger's same Powerfoyle solar charging material, but have been updated to include more energy-efficient internal components, adaptive (rather than simply active) noise cancellation, and more optimized designs.
Both are still in development and won't go on sale until around mid-year, but when they do launch, they'll be priced slightly cheaper than their first-gen counterparts. The second-generation Los Angeles will cost $179 (versus $199 for the originals), while the second-generation Phoenix will cost $129 (versus $149).
In essence, both the headphones and earphones are still designed to deliver formidable amounts of listening between charges by recharging battery levels with light. It's hard to say exactly how formidable it is because of the variability in the amount of light (outdoor sunlight is best, but they will still be charged by indoor ambient light) they might be exposed to, but current estimates of duration of the Urbanista's drums range from weeks to an infinite amount of listening.
With 10 hours of “low” light charging per day, for example, which involves a combination of indoor light and sunlight through a window, Urbanista estimates that someone listening to the new Los Angeles headphones for four hours a day could reach more than 50 hours a day. days without needing to charge. But less listening or more light could make playback time virtually infinite, the company estimates.
Meanwhile, Urbanista says the second-generation Phoenix headphones could offer almost 16 days of listening with the same 10 hours of “low light” charging and four hours of listening per day. This increases to over 100 days of playback with two hours of daily listening and increased sunlight exposure or even “infinite” listening if they are constantly exposed to enough light. Ten hours of daily solar charging seems optimistic given the time my own headphones and earphones typically spend in pockets or backpacks, so we'll have to see how this translates to real-world use. Fortunately, both devices have traditional USB-C ports for when their batteries inevitably run out.
Urbanista has made numerous adjustments to both devices to address the issues of the original models and update them with modern headphones, while maintaining their innovative solar charging intelligence.
The new Los Angeles cans, for example, now come with an old 3.5mm jack for wired listening. This was an annoying omission in the original Los Angeles model, which the company made in order to maximize energy efficiency. (Apparently 3.5mm jacks can result in higher power consumption. Who knew?) But by selecting the right components and integrating them in the right way, Urbanista has minimized the battery consumption associated with this feature.
From weeks of listening, to infinity.
Another tweak highlighted in the company's press release is that the new earbuds should be more comfortable with a lower “clamping force,” which I found to be a strangely annoying issue with the originals.
Interestingly, despite Urbanista's claims that the LA has more energy-efficient internals this time around, the headphones' rated battery life (aka how much listening you'd get without solar charging in a completely dark environment) it has actually decreased from 80 to 60 hours. Urbanista product manager Mårten Sahlén tells me that the company decided to take advantage of this increase in energy efficiency to put a smaller battery in the new Los Angeles to make them lighter and more comfortable. Urbanista reasoned that sixty hours is still more than the 30 or 40 hours offered by many of its competitors and, in practice, should also be longer in combination with solar charging.
The new Phoenix wireless headphones have suffered no such cuts and now offer a total of 40 hours of playback. That's 32 hours from the case (up from 24 last time) and eight hours from the buds themselves (same as before). Otherwise, the headphones have been updated similarly to the Los Angeles ones. Their internal parts are now more energy efficient and their overall size has been reduced to make them more comfortable.
Elsewhere, improvements are minor. Los Angeles now supports multipoint for the first time, meaning the headphones can connect to multiple source devices at once. It's not a new feature for the Phoenix headphones, but Sahlén tells me it's being updated to make it easier to manage via the companion app. In-ear detection isn't new either, but it's been updated for new models, and the Phoenix has an improved IP54 rating instead of IPX4, meaning it's now protected against dust in addition to splashes of water.
The Exeger Powerfoyle solar charging material itself is fundamentally the same as the first generation models. That's not to say the material hasn't improved since the launch of the original Los Angeles in 2021. But improved materials have already made their way into first-generation headphones and earbuds with each subsequent manufacturing run.
While Urbanista was an early adopter of Exeger's solar charging technology, a handful of other companies have also announced plans to integrate the technology. TP Vision announced a partnership in late November to bring Powerfoyle to Philips brand sports headphones, and today, 3M announced a pair of solar-charging Bluetooth hearing protectors for industrial users. But Urbanista marketing director Tuomas Lonka does not seem worried about incoming competition and believes the company has the advantage of having several more years of experience with this technology.
“It's great that there are more products on the market that use this technology,” says Lonka. “People become more aware of it, believe in it and consumers will probably start to prefer it in products.”
Additionally, with more companies working with the technology, Lonka believes the entire industry will benefit from each other's learnings. “A lot of these things we're developing, we're figuring out as we go,” she says. “If we see others adopting the technology, maybe we can take some things to improve our own product. So I think overall, for the whole ecosystem around Powerfoyle, it's great to have more players coming out.”
