When they work, the experience is blissful. You grab the charging case, slide it open, pop the earbuds out and fit them into your ears, and press play on your phone.

As earbuds go, they sound great, and they stay put in your ears thanks to foam tips that create a solid seal every time. (That also means you can listen at lower volumes; I was constantly two or three clicks lower on my phone’s volume with Earin than I am with my over-the-ear headphones.) You snap them in and out of a futuristic charging case that looks like the neuralyzer from Men In Black, red light and all.

When they work, the experience is blissful

There are also no wires that tangle or yank your phone off your desk or out of your hand. There’s no cord that’s so long that you have to ball it up and stuff it in your pocket, or buy an entirely new accessory just to maintain. Instead, you’re left with two small bits of plastic and metal that slip into (and more importantly, stay in) your ears, objects that conjure music from your phone like some sort of magic trick.

But that’s only when they work.

There are lots of little things about the Earin buds that contribute to a very inelegant user experience, and there was no mistaking that the Earin earbuds were made by an inexperienced startup.

The most egregious is also the first thing I noticed about the Earin earbuds. When you snap them into the cylindrical carrying case, a tiny red light signals that the earbuds are charging. That light operates in a binary manner — it only turns on or off. It can’t change colors, and it can’t blink or pulsate. When your earbuds are fully charged, the light turns off.

That’s a problem. Say you toss the earbuds in the case for a charge, and 10 minutes in, the light goes off. Did the earbuds’ charge really top off that quickly? Or is the case dead? There’s no easy way to know at a glance, and there’s also no way to know how much charge the case has left. The case can charge earbuds multiple times before it dies, which is good because their battery life hovers under 3 hours. But, on multiple occasions, I opened the case to find dead earbuds when I thought they were fully charged. (You can check the battery level of each earbud in the companion app, but not while they’re snapped into the case.)