Ponto de Vista

Formerly called AfterShokz Endurance, now Shokz OpenSwim

TL;DR: Cough up the dough and get the Shokz OpenSwim. Don’t waste time on JBL (ugh), Sony or Pyle or anything else

If you want to swim with music, my caveats, explanations, and explorations on waterproof mp3 players for swimming that I’ve tried in the last decade, read on. Click on any image to expand

I’ve been swimming seriously (for joy, not competition) since 2013 and way back in 2014 or so I thought music would only enhance my experience, help me set a pace, and also entertain me and stimulate my brain as I did laps with an unchanging scenery. At my peak form, pre-pandemic, I was doing 2,000m in 1.25 hours (slow, slow) and I’m building back but you can only imagine that going back and forth in an environment, where only obnoxious humans change, can get a little too same!

Back in 2014 I bought my first music player and it was a no-name Chinese mp3 player for some $20. It worked until one day it didn’t. I didn’t seal the usb port cover fully and the electronic components drowned.

The Sony Walkman nw-ws413 + charger

I then tried the Pyle (rated well, cheapish, easily available). Same problem. Water got in. Or maybe they just stopped charging one day. I honestly can’t recall.

By 2016 time I’d found a place in Bandra that sold the Sony NW-WS413SBM waterproof walkman.

Back then it was just over 5k retail with warranty. Initially my mac wouldn’t read it to transfer music, but a couple of resets and it finally became quite good at detecting it was an external drive. Until some time in  2018 it stopped holding a charge. It was just out of warranty, but Sony was amazing about giving me a huge discount on a fresh, updated piece (Sony NWWS413BM). So, all in all, I paid maybe 3k more for the upgrade.

Then came the pandemic. Pools were shut for 2 years in all of Maharashtra state, where I live. From March 24, 2020 until February 4, 2022, I didn’t get in the water. I mean, it wasn’t just me. Swimmers and athletes contemplated relocating to use pools elsewhere. The Maharashtra swim team was pretty much living in Gujarat!

When I got ready to swim again the Sony had given up the ghost. This happens if you don’t turn it on even once in two years.

The JBL Endurance Dive is a scam. This is the replacement set I got.

At this point, I finally got the JBL dive. No link because, trust me, you don’t want it. WHAT A COLOSSAL WASTE OF MONEY this product has been.

Whoever designed it, approved it, and then released it to the public has never, ever even TRIED to swim with it. It’s the epitome of false marketing to call it a “dive” model and just glomming on a random name for a feature that actually doesn’t work. Perhaps because it is rated IPX7? That doesn’t mean you can swim with it. Seriously, use it as a bluetooth headset, connect it with your phone if you want and go run in the rain, but don’t bother swimming.

First: getting it into swim mode is next to impossible. My first time, I spent 30 minutes of my 45 minute swim time trying to get it to do the three taps to stay at “mp3” locked mode.

Really useless instructions for the JBL Endurance Dive

I watched video tutorials and practiced after that. Of three more swims, I managed once for a few minutes to get it in the right mode. That triple tap was impossible. After the second tap, the device has had enough and done what it needs to do (bluetooth pairing mode) with or without your third tap. I went bonkers spacing them and trying all kinds of rhythms and speed.

IF you get it into locked mp3 mode and it starts playing, you can change nothing. NOTHING. You cannot control volume, you cannot skip a track, go back, pause. Nothing. The playlist is locked. IF you can get it to actually go into swim mode.

It never worked again.  I called JBL, trekked to their service centre and even the technicians could not make it work. They replaced the set, no questions asked, but would not let me open it in the centre and would not speak to whether this one would work. No surprises, dear reader: it didn’t. It’s a terrible design flaw and only after much research can you find reviews basically saying people have just thrown it away.

More useless instructions for the JBL Endurance Dive

I haven’t even been able to give mine away; the quality of the ear hooks is so bad, they look like my cat chewed them (and she hasn’t, she has better taste). Getting the touch button to respond to anything is terrible. There are no controls for volume or shuffle or answer and the touch sensitivity is … well, it’s too good for itself which makes it too bad for a user.

So, finally, I bit the bullet and after researching the hell out of swim blogs, reviews, youtube unboxings and more, I decided the Shokz (formerly Aftershokz) were going to get my money. $150 in the US plus some ridiculous $9 for shipping and holy cow, this has only underscored that it’s better to go with premium the first time than to shaft yourself by going with second and third best numerous times.

The Shokz OpenSwim with charger and silicone earplugs

The Shokz are FLAWLESS. They’re designed to stay put.

Bone conduction means you can get consistent sound when you go under the surface AND when you come up for air. I can hear bass. I can even listen to podcasts without missing alternate words when I surface — a major flaw with in-ear swimming mp3 players — because water still enters your canals when you dip and out. With earplugs in the ears, ambient noise and pressure stays the same. It’s wonderful.

Just like with the Sony, there is a dedicated button for start/stop/program. Long press the volume up or down for skipping forward and back a track.  It’s got shuffle and repeat mode. You can press the middle button to check battery health as well.

The charger also doubles as the USB interface and no computer so far has had trouble reading it to load music.

Okay, now if you don’t already now this: BLUETOOTH DOES NOT WORK UNDERWATER. If you’ve been told (or sold something that says) it does, it’s an outright lie.

To load up ANY swimming music player, you’re going to have to physically load music files on to it like it’s an external drive. So, here are my tips on how to do that in an age of streaming services for music.

Buttons! Ergonomic, and intuitive.

1. Pay for and download the music and then transfer it from your computer or USB connected device to the headset.
2. Get an audio capture extension for your browser and record the track while playing the music you want on youtube or some or web based app.
3. Get two female stereo jacks and play music off your phone while recording it into a digital handheld recorder (I use a Tascam for work so I have one of them and I have a Zoom H1n both of which take a 3.5″ input) which I then transfer to the Shokz after normalizing the gain on Hindenburg because I’m an audio nerd and I can.

Ratings:
Pyle: 3 out of 5
Sony NW-WS410 swimming Mp3 Walkman series: 3.5 stars out of 5
JBL Endurance Dive: 0 bloody stars out of 5
Shokz OpenSwim: 6 out of 5

Disclaimers: I’m not being paid for this blog post but if Shokz wants to give me any gear, I’ll happily accept. JBL has never replied to my emails or reviews. Sony is a stalwart and their customer service is just tops. I’m an amazon affiliate and if you buy anything through one of my links, I get like 0.01% commission on it. 

I've never done tarot in my life. Although I was curious about it when I read about (and watched) Childermas's deck in Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell, I've never been drawn to it. Today, someone presented me cards from a Goddess Deck – and so, I decided to go with the flow. The person proffering them suggested formulating a question before reaching for one. I sifted through many options and finally settled on "What am I doing with on life? Am I on the right track?" I zoned in on a card, drew it out, and sat back on my haunches. What you see in the picture is what I picked. It's the card of Oonagh, an ancient Irish Queen of the Fairies, who is also a potent Goddess of magic. And the text just made me laugh. It wasn't the answer I was looking for — and maybe it would have fit any question anyone in the group had asked — but it worked for me. Keep calm, let life happen. I need to remember that more. #blog #tarot #destiny #cards #keepcalm #goddess #runes #magic #answers #questions #fortune #fortuneteller

A post shared by chhavi sachdev (@chhavi_sachdev) on Nov 30, 2015 at 8:42am PST

This was Delhi. Two sadhus. Two monkeys. I asked if I could take a photo. The man in the photo said “Kyu nahin?” (Why not?) The sadhu behind him called out for money, shouting, “Paisa to de do!” I ignored him. As did the monkeys.

Also from Rishikesh, this machine purports to read your mind, calibrate your thoughts (see the odometers?) and then broadcast your past, present and future through the headphones 😀 I loved it. For 20 bucks, I was told that the things I was worried about would resolve themselves, my health would improve and I’d become rich. 😀 Paisa wasooli 🙂

That’s me. I’m proud to have voted. I’m pleased to be able to exercise my rights and do my civic duty. This time was MUCH easier than the last time in 2009. I’m still the wrong age, have the wrong name, and am listed in the wrong gender, but they overlooked all that. I only drew attention to the spelling and the ‘purush’ part but both the list booth and the polling agent brushed it off as a typo. And after 3 minutes of being in line, I had verified my identity, pushed my selection, and I was out. I didn’t even get to crack open Kiran Manral’s The Reluctant Detective that I’d thought to bring along with me based on the long wait last time! 🙂

P.S. I’m very disillusioned by my friends who haven’t voted. What do you do with your friends whose ideologies and basic values don’t match yours? Demotion? Deletion?

Usually, these say things like “Don tuch me” 😀 I thought this was an interesting variation. The cabbie was initially upset because he thought I was photographing the meter to trounce him for cheating on the fare (which he well may have been).Then I said, no, I liked his Ganeshji, and he could very well reset it to zero.

Once he was satisfied I really, truly liked it, he turned the meter back down to zero and then suggested angles from which I could get better shots 😀

So the BMC has decided it will now prune trees to prevent stray branches from falling. You know what that means, right? They’re just going to start chopping everything down in sight. My neighboring building society head told me that they’d chopped down the tree between us because “mosquitoes are breeding there”. He claims to be a horticulturist. Who never went to school, evidently. Because in his next breath he also told us it didn’t matter because “Only Tulsi” gives out oxygen, other trees are not important. I nearly slit my own wrists. Maybe these little clay gods will protect this peepul from being ‘pruned’ BMC horticulture style …

This gem from the old market in Siem Reap, Cambodia. If only I could sell MY rants, too. I have so many – from Delhi’s lack of civic sense to my uncle’s Islamophobia, to the state of our educational systems in India, not to mention the state of radio in India…. 😉
Anyway, these are handmade LADY rants 😉 Mine aren’t very ladylike, I’ll admit. So for those, you’ll really have to travel to Cambodia.

What a thrill, right? To see my brother’s film posters on buses and walls 🙂 But the movie was unfortunately timed; it released with 8 other films and was almost totally ignored by the mainstream press (Ok, the Mumbai Mirror did review it and decimated it, but the Times Group seemed to have decided to boycott it. Others said they’d had to choose three or four of the eight and “Toss” just didn’t make the cut).
So, we tried to salvage some of it by creating a buzz in the social media fraternity and while that didn’t really take off either (logistics, quick-changes of movies in theatres, I left for Cambodia), it interestingly garnered a mention as a sort of case study in Campaign India magazine. It didn’t talk about the results, but I’m glad someone noticed the effort! Read the story Do Indian Bloggers affect consumer views? here. What do you think?

Is this bliss or is this bliss? I’m not trying to romanticize the life of this beast of labor or anthropomorphize this dude here but I caught sight of him recently at Warden Road and he was so striking, I had to stop and video him. I swear to you, he looked like he had hit hay nirvana. He was smacking his lips loudly and his eyes rolled back into his head. I think there was no doubt whatsoever that he was beaming to himself in sheer happiness. So I stopped to watch, and soon a small crowd of people had also stopped to smile at the bull and each other. Well, all except the bull’s maalik. Guess he hadn’t gotten to his own fodder, yet. 😉