Moondrop Nekocake Girl’s Frontline Earbuds Review
Anime girls can’t save a lacking user experience
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Purchase Price: $59.99
Out of the Box
The Moondrop Nekocake wireless earphones come with a charging case weighing in at 37g and each ear piece individually weighs 4.4g. It comes with 3 additional sets of ear tips and a USB-C charging cable. It also comes with a silicone cover for the charging case. A pretty standard affair, but the unique thing that Moondrop provides is an anime aesthetic to their products.
For features, the Nekocake has a competitive set of useful benefits like digital active noise-cancellation, as well as noise canceling for calls, Bluetooth 5.2 connectivity, and an advertised battery life of 4 hour play time with a 12-hour total battery life with the charging case.
Most people probably don’t have an earbud case with an anime girl plastered over it unless they’re a weeb. Moondrop wants to endorse weeb culture as a Girl’s Frontline character is front and center on the case and earbuds. Game collabs are popular and this mobile strategy role-playing game is the star of the Nekocake. The package also comes with a character plastic cutout that you can display.
Battery Life
Girl’s Frontline is a mobile strategy game
The battery life seems to hold up very well. I’ve charged it twice in about 2 weeks of review usage and it didn’t seem to have any issues keeping up with my lifestyle. The charging case itself has an indication light to determine the overall battery life, but its indicator is based on a green light or an orange light. It does not prompt the phone of what charge level it’s currently at. It would have been nice to have any method to identify the exact percentage of charge left instead of leaving the user to guess. However, for most daily users who charge infrequently, the Nekocake holds up just as well as any other wireless earphones.
Fit and Comfort
The Moondrop Nekocake fit is pretty average. It's bigger than a lot of the wireless earbuds that populate the market nowadays. The stem is pretty much in a square form. It doesn’t get in the way, but when you put it into consideration with the earpiece, I would say it's of a similar size to the Beats Studio Bud. Moondrop designed it with a bigger bulb part since the driver is bigger, but with this size, it’s not the most comfortable after like an hour lodged into an ear. They do not have the snuggest fit possible so I would have to readjust ever so often to get it to sit in place better. Even with the slightly loose fit, the Nekocake’s fit luckily does not affect how it sounds.
Function
The Nekocake best feature is that it pairs almost instantly when you take it out of the case. It’s as quick as the Apple Airpod Pros and sometimes it greets you with a recorded voice of an Asian lady saying “Landed on your secret device” which is honestly kinda creepy. It’s not anime girl cute at all which I know they were trying to match the theme with, but definitely missed the mark on. If they’re listening and selling my data, I want a cut into that profit. But unfortunately as for functionality, that might be the sole highlight.
The active noise canceling that it claims it has doesn’t seem like it works too well. There used to be a downloadable app for these earbuds, but that no longer seems to be supported as of publishing of this review. So I’m not sure if it’s something that has to get turned on via an app, but regardless, that’s not the best user experience for a feature that should be easy to access.
The touch features work fine but are pretty basic in pausing and restarting your playing session when you need it. This feature also works on answer calls, but this is where I ran into some inconsistency. When I tested the call quality, it seemed to give me some noise issues. Sometimes it sounds just fine on the other end, but in some instances, the quality was very distant and muted to the point where the caller could barely hear what I was saying. Unfortunately the user experience of these Nekocake earbuds was very hit or miss to me.
Sound Quality
The audio quality was definitely the best feature of these earbuds. The Mooncase Nekocake packs in a 13mm titanium driver and it definitely packs a punch. The Nekocase’s sound was pretty solid and full. I think it actually sounds a tad better than the Beats Studio Bud which I’ve been using as an everyday carry by choice.
The base hits a little harder than most earbuds I’ve reviewed and it does sound very defined overall. I would say Moondrop went in mostly on the bass as its one frequency that got most of the budget assigned to. I think music that favors more low end heavy instrumentals will be the most enjoyable experience on Moondrop.
My only issue with it was not being able to control some of the tuning. Once again, these features could have been supported on the app, but as of publishing this review, I was not able to get it working on iOS. As a result, I always had to turn down the volume because the Nekocase tended to run pretty loud. Considering it wasn’t a snug fit with my ear configuration, I would have this on the first or second volume level on my phone.
Verdict
The Moondrop Nekocake wireless earphones offer solid sound with the 13mm driver. The brand has developed a bit of an underground following for delivering sneaky good value in the audio market over the last couple of years. However, while the audio is low end heavy here, but still great, a lot of the other core features that are expected on earbuds are missing refinement. The non-existent active noise canceling, limited features without a working app and large fit (this is my personal issue with it) all contribute to a somewhat lackluster user experience. All it’s got is the game character design on the case that might attract fans of the franchise. If you’re a fan of the design and can do without reliable noise canceling then it’s a pretty solid earbud that packs a solid sound for the price.
With a unique design and well-advertised active noise cancellation, the 1MORE ComfoBuds Pro retails for $70 and looks like the next generation of slim and modern earbuds. How do they perform when put the test with real life usage?