Audio startup Doppler Labs has delayed the shipment of Here One, the wireless earbuds that can stream music and also augment the sounds of the world around you. The earbuds were announced in June and were supposed to ship in November, but that date has now been pushed to February.
I got a short but impressive demo of the Here One in late October. The truly wireless earbuds seemed like they allow the perfect mix of streaming and the ability to let in (and modify) the audio of the world around you. But Doppler CEO Noah Kraft told The Verge that, while early Here One units haven’t shown any problems, the company still needs time to do what’s known as a “validation build.”
“We need to make sure that we can do this consistently across a mass market scale,” Kraft said. “And since we want to go to retail, and we want to do this right, I basically had to make the call.”
No problems, just a longer wait
That means breaking the news to customers who preordered (Kraft won’t say exactly how many just yet) Here One, and it also means missing the holiday window. Kraft said “there’s definitely frustration” in not shipping before the holidays, especially because the company was hoping to take advantage of Apple’s recent removal of the headphone jack on the iPhone. “If we were shipping right know I’d be doing a lot of high fives. There’s 47 million iPhone 7s shipping in Q4.”