Corporate inadequacy has rendered my favorite rediscovered gadget useless

I went for a run this morning while holding my iPhone, which was connected to a cable that attached to my earbuds. I’ve exercised with wired headphones for years, but today, the cord, with its persistent jostling, was especially distracting.

That’s because I was previously running with a pair of Bluetooth earbuds, EPOS’s GTW 270. They came out in 2021 for $200, and I received them as a gift. They typically sat in a drawer until this spring, when I started running outside (rather than in a gym or not at all) for the first time in a couple of years. Without a place to store my phone, wired headphones felt cumbersome while running. I previously overlooked the GTW 270 because they are not as comfortable as my wired earbuds and tend to lose their connection (especially with my PC) if the audio stops playing momentarily. The latter problem proved less common when using the earbuds with my phone, though. Suddenly, I was enamored with a gadget that had spent most of its life forgotten in a drawer.

But after a few short months, one of my earliest concerns about wireless earbuds was realized: I lost the GTW 270’s case, which charges the earbuds and enables pairing.

The bad news got worse when I realized that EPOS doesn’t sell standalone charging cases. EPOS used to sell them but stopped after the company exited the consumer technology market, just three years after entering it.

A short-lived business endeavor

Demant, a Danish health care audio tech company, launched the EPOS brand in 2020 from a shuttered joint venture with German audio firm Sennheiser that was called Sennheiser Communications.