Creative WP-250 review

Creative’s WP-250 Bluetooth headphones are designed for sports use. Two design elements help to ensure that they stay put: the earpieces are designed to sit firmly in place, with an earplug style tip that sits firmly in your ear canal.

The cable connecting them has also been shaped to form ear hooks, although those with a narrow head may find that these won’t sit comfortably over their ears. Regardless, the headphones stayed in place during our stair running test and they didn’t even drop out when we shook our head from side to side, although they did feel a little loose during that part of the test.

They feel a little bulky at first, but we soon became used to that once we felt certain that they weren’t going to fall from our ears. All the controls are on the right-hand earpiece, comprising a button for picking up calls, a jog wheel for track skipping, and volume buttons. We particularly liked the jog wheel, but we would have preferred the volume and track controls to be on opposite earpieces.

The headphones’ bass-heavy sound isn’t particularly desirable for general listening, although it may help encourage you to keep pace while running. Their mid-range definition was good, but high sounds such as cymbals were very much lost in the mix. Unlike some of Creative’s Bluetooth gear, the WP-250 set doesn’t support AptX, so there’s the slight loss of fidelity typical of A2DP audio. The earphones did a better job of picking up a Bluetooth signal from our iPod than some rivals, suffering no drop-outs, even when we had our MP3 player in our trouser pocket rather than on an arm strap.

These are among the cheaper Bluetooth headphones around. Their audio quality is acceptable, if not astonishingly good, and they’re comfortable to wear. However, we’d pay slightly more for Plantronics BackBeat 903+ set.