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These headphones from Phaz will charge up your smartphone while you listen

These headphones from Phaz will charge up your smartphone while you listen

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As much as it pains us to admit, smartphone battery life is not exactly improving by leaps and bounds. Instead of building better batteries, lots of companies are trying to find easier ways to keep our phones constantly topped off — Motorola's Turbo Charger that gets you eight hours of battery life in 15 minutes is a good example. A new headphone maker (unfortunately) called Phaz is offering its own unique take on solving our battery woes — these rechargeable headphones include a battery to power a built-in amplifier (there's also a bass booster — gotta keep up with Beats). The real interesting feature here though is that you can also plug a USB cable into them and charge your phone from the built-in battery.

Of course, this leaves you with two cords dangling down to your phone as you listen to music — but if you're in a tight pinch and need to power up your phone, that could be a price well worth paying. Phaz says the built-in battery should be enough to get your phone about 70 percent filled up, but that'll vary depending on your specific device. The headphones themselves are much lighter than you'd expect considering they have a backup battery back built in, and the sound quality was good and well-balanced (though it's hard to give a real critical review given the rushed demo conditions and abundance of background noise here at CES). And even if you drain the battery fully, you can still use the headphones with the amp turned off in passive mode. That said, they weren't exactly the most comfortable headphones I've put on — the top connecting bar that rests on your head could use a little more padding, in my opinion.

Phaz P2 charging headphones

At $249, these aren't exactly cheap headphones, and the somewhat loud styling means they'll only appear to a specific set of users — a lot of people might be better just buying a good external battery pack. Still, we have to give Phaz credit for coming up with a clever idea to keep our devices topped off — here at CES, we're constantly charging our phones, so having another battery source is never a bad thing.