SHENZHEN—Are three percent of people aliens? Mutants? Or do they just have a particularly embarrassing superpower? At electronics maker Anker's headquarters this week, we took a look at its new Spirit headset line, which uses tech from Chinese military submarines to try to fight off the disgusting effluent of the heaviest sweaters.
Anker makes a lot of things—batteries, light bulbs, robot vacuums—and it's super-aware of its customer reviews on Amazon. When Anker's audio product manager Rock Gao looked into why its headphones were getting rated down, he found a pretty gross reason.
"Some customers have to buy a sport headset three times, even four times a year because they're heavy sweaters," he said. "Typically, for this form factor, the return rate is around five percent. At least three percent will be dead by human sweat."
Sweat is tricky because it's salty. Unlike fresh water, which rolls off of nanocoatings, the salt in sweat can crust on electronics and short them out. And sport headsets, which typically have a cable behind the head connecting two earbuds, are particularly vulnerable. Sweat collects on the cable, then rolls down the cable into the headset's control box, where it ruins the electronics.
"All the products out there claim they have nanocoatings, but they pretty much do not work," Gao said.
Bring On the Submarines
For Anker's Sweat Guard technology, Gao decided to look at tubes full of advanced electronics that need to resist salt water under pressure: Submarines.
"The most advanced technologies come from weapons," he said.
First, he compartmentalized the control box so salt can't leak throughout it. Then he applied a "glue process" and coatings derived from maritime tech.
"There are some design centers in China that figure out coating materials to make ships run faster and more smoothly," he said.
The result: He says he's cracked the sweat problem, developing a headset that can spend 40 hours under salt water, not just five minutes like many other headsets—although you should still rinse it frequently, because, gross.
"We believe we've solved the last problem for this kind of form factor before it's replaced totally by true wireless," he said.
Anker's next step will be to put a dedicated Google Assistant button into its low-cost Spirit headset line (pictured above), and after that, it will enable Google Assistant actions through saying "OK, Google." While you can do that by pressing an action button on a headset now, building the activation into the headset's chipset makes the functionality considerably faster and smoother.
Three Spirit headsets are now on sale: the Spirit, the Spirit X, and the Spirit Pro, all for under $50. They all feature the submarine-derived tech to resist your fluids.