

Visually, the Zik headset is simply striking -- its curvaceous design blends synthetic leather pads with soft-touch coated earcups, and sturdy feeling brushed-metal for its head rails and under the cups where you'll find all various connections and mics. Specifically, on the right cup you'll find a micro USB port for charging, a 3.5mm jack for an audio cable if you'd rather go wired, one of its many microphones, as well as its backlit power button. Moving along to the left cup, you'll mainly notice more microphones. If the mics on the outside weren't enough, there's also another one inside of each earcup. According to Parrot, some of these are purposed for helping with active noise-cancellation, while the others are for picking up vocals to ensure clean voice quality on during phone calls.

On the left earcup is where you'll find the sensors we mentioned earlier, as well as the headset's NFC chip. First up, its "jawbone" sensor notes your jaw's movement while you're talking, aiming to add extra clarity for the persons on the other end any phone calls. The presence sensor, is even more intriguing -- the headset automatically pauses yours tunes when you take them of your ears, and starts playing 'em again as soon as you bring them back up to your ears. Taking the headphones on and off, we were pleased to find that playback and pausing was nearly instantaneous, making for an extremely fluid experience.

As far as Near Field Communication goes, Parrot's added this as a quick and painless way to pair to the headset with phones that support it. A user will simply tap their device on the left earcup to connect the headset, very similar to what we've seen some Nokia devices. The right earcup houses the Ziks touch sensor. By swiping forward and backward we're able to move through our playlist, while sliding our finger up and down allowed us to the control the volume. Added with the awareness of its presence sensor for pausing and playing, it made for a very intuitive way to control thing, however, we do wish there was a way to pause and play from the touch-panel itself, rather than having to do it from the device or take the headphones off.

Getting back on about wearing the Zik headset, these may very well be the most comfortable headphones we've ever tried on. The memory foam used inside of the earpads is pleasingly supple, and we barely felt any pressure on our ears. If we had to nitpick, we'd say the headband felt stiff in comparison, and we did notice the headrails might not extend far enough for folks with large noggins. Of course, having only spend minutes with the headphones we can't make a definitive call on comfort, but we can't say we were disappointed in the least.

Focusing on the sides of the earcups, you'll also notice some horned vents. Apparently, this lets its 40mm drivers breath like a hybrid between isolating closed-back and spacious sounding opened-back headphones. If you're worried about noise-isolation, you'll recall that the Ziks also have an active noise-cancellation circuit. The suite we demoed the headphones in had a very unruly air conditioning system, and we were pleased to find that with noise-cancellation enabled, it was all but wooshed away with near silence (Parrot says that in total they'll reduce lower-register external noise by about 11dB 20dB).

Although we're impressed, a few things are worth note. Sadly, we weren't able to get a consistent Bluetooth connection during our time with the Zik headset, so we can't make even the slightest call on sound quality for the time being. Notably, we're told that the headset isn't voiced to Parrot's liking just yet, anyway, so hopefully we'll be able to gauge it in the future. As we mentioned earlier, the Zik can be used with an app for enabling sound enhancements, but likewise, that also wasn't available for us to check out. You may also find yourself wondering about battery life, given how techno-loaded the Ziks are. According the Parrot, with everything enabled the headset's rechargeable -- and user replaceable -- battery will last for about fives hours, nearing closer to 20 depending on how much of its features you disable. Thankfully, the headphone's don't require to power to play music, so you'll be able to plug them in if you're ever faced with a dead battery.





Overall, we're finding ourselves smitten with the potential of Parrot's Zik. If the sound quality of the final version set to ship this year actually delivers, this could be a very compelling set of cans -- especially for gadget-minded audio lovers. There's also the question of price. Keeping Parrot's other Starck devices in mind, we'd expect these puppies to be quite pricey once they actually hit store shelves. For now, if you'd like more info on the Zik headset be sure to check out the press release just below.