boAt Airdopes 138 Gen 2 Review: Exceptional Battery at a Budget Price

The Airdopes 138 Gen 2 wears its budget roots honestly. The design is clean and unadorned — no flashy lighting, no complex contouring — just a straightforward earbud form factor built to sit in your ears and stay there during everyday use. The plastics feel consistent and the seams are well-aligned; there's no worrying creak when you handle them. Build quality reflects the price point without feeling cheap or unreliable.

The earbuds use a standard stem-style fit without wingtips. For commuting, desk work, and casual listening, the comfort is solid for most ear shapes. Anyone planning intense gym sessions or trail runs may find the fit less secure than earbuds with ear hooks or silicone fins — the stem design prioritises comfort over grip during high-motion activity.

The charging case is compact enough to slide into a pocket or small bag without bulk. One genuinely useful inclusion is a travel bag in the box — a small detail that signals boAt understands how these earbuds actually get used day to day.

Water and Sweat Resistance

The IPX4 rating means the earbuds handle sweat and light splash exposure confidently. Wear them at the gym, in a light drizzle, or during a walk in humid weather and they'll survive without issue. IPX4 is not a waterproof rating — they are not designed for submersion or heavy rain. Sweat-resistant is the accurate description, and it is also the limit of this protection.

Ten hours of earbud runtime per charge is more than most workdays, longer than almost every long-haul flight, and enough to carry you through a weekend trip without hunting for a charger. That's not typical for this price range — it's decisively above it.

The charging case holds a substantial power reserve — enough to top up the earbuds multiple times over, delivering a combined total of approximately 70 hours before the entire system needs a wall charge. For most users, that works out to roughly a week of regular daily listening between charges. That figure is genuinely difficult to match at this price point.

Recharging the case takes around two hours via USB-C — the same cable already in use for most modern phones and accessories. Fast charging means a short top-up while getting ready in the morning delivers hours of listening, even when overnight charging was forgotten.

A built-in battery level indicator ensures you're never caught off guard by an unexpected shutdown. Voice prompts reinforce this by alerting you to battery status during use.

Most budget earbuds treat the microphone as an afterthought — a single element included to satisfy a specification checkbox. The Airdopes 138 Gen 2 takes a different approach: four microphones distributed across both earbuds, paired with active noise suppression processing designed to isolate your voice from the surrounding environment.

In practical terms, this means that when you take a call in a café, on a commuter train, or in an open-plan office, the microphone array actively filters out background sound before your voice reaches the other person. The result is clearer call audio without asking the person you're speaking with to increase their volume or repeat themselves.

A dedicated mute function is accessible directly from the earbud touch controls — no reaching for a phone screen, no interrupting a meeting to find the right button. For anyone on frequent calls or virtual meetings throughout the workday, one-touch mute is a practical convenience that earns its keep every session.

The earbuds function fully as a headset, routing calls, voice assistant requests, and video conferencing audio through them without requiring you to remove them or manually switch audio sources on your device.

The battery system is the defining achievement here. Seventy hours of total system runtime is not something commonly found at this price point, and for users whose primary frustration with budget earbuds has been constant charging, this is a genuine and lasting solution. The combination of long per-earbud endurance and a large-capacity case means the Airdopes 138 Gen 2 can go the better part of a week without needing a wall outlet — a practical advantage that compounds every single day.

The four-microphone call setup with active voice suppression is the second standout strength. Budget earbuds routinely sacrifice call hardware to hit a low price target. The Airdopes 138 Gen 2 makes a different choice — investing in call quality that people who work, study, and communicate remotely will notice and appreciate on every call.

Bluetooth 5.4 with 45ms latency is the third notable strength. Shipping with a current-generation Bluetooth version at this price tier is not guaranteed across the competition. The connection stability, power efficiency, and latency this delivers are meaningfully better than the older standards that still dominate the budget category.

The absence of any noise isolation — passive or active — is the most significant limitation for buyers who share environments with persistent background noise. In quiet settings, this is irrelevant. On public transport, in open offices, or anywhere noise is constant, you'll either raise the volume beyond a comfortable level or accept that your music coexists with the world around you. Neither is ideal for focused listening.

No companion app means the sound signature is fixed. If the factory tuning doesn't match your preferences — too much bass, not enough treble — there is no software path to correction. Buyers who value equalizer control will find this genuinely limiting.

The omission of smart features — auto ear detection, find-my-earbuds, ambient passthrough — is deliberate rather than an oversight, but it should be a conscious purchase decision rather than a post-delivery surprise. Once experienced on a higher-tier product, these features are harder to go without than they appear in a spec list.