When the Sony Xperia Ear, the AirPod-like headset, was released in late 2016, it wasn’t met with much excitement and the reviews were quite brutal. IBT called Xperia Ear

 frustrating. It lacks any form of wow factor and doesn’t offer any real benefits over talking to Siri or Google Now through the headphones you are already using 

and Cherlynn Low from Engadget concluded:

 I was excited about the Xperia Ear and what it promised until I realized that, as it stands, the device does nothing different from Siri or Google over wired earbuds. In particular, the fact that it requires you to use your hand and press a button to use it makes me question the device’s existence in the first place. What’s the point of getting a whole new gadget for an assistant in your ear if not for the convenience when your arms are full? It’s not like this is a cheap purchase, either. 

Though doubtful Sony can do anything to completely revamp the Xperia Ear via software to turn it into a compelling device, in its first post launch update, a few noteworthy tweaks are coming that should make the headset more useful.

From the Sony Mobile Blog:

Voice notifications – Previously Xperia Ear could handle alerts for SMS, WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, Line, Email, Gmail, Twitter, Calendar and News Suite. With the new software Xperia Ear will now be able to read alerts and provide notifications for *any* app of your choosing

Email Filter – A new filter function means that users can set rules to dictate which emails will be read out via voice notification, based on sender or subject

Updated head gestures – Users can now accept and decline calls with a nod or shake of the head, cancel notification read out with another head shake, and even shake their head left/right to skip music tracks forward/back

I’m a big believer that you can only launch once and no matter how many incremental updates you do afterwards, you can never recover what was lost if your product was initially met with less than stellar reviews. This of course doesn’t mean Sony should abandon the users who’ve bought the Xperia Ear, so all post launch updates are appreciated. Instead to me, the Xperia Ear screams a device that clearly still needed time in the lab both from a software perspective and a hardware one.

Do you know anybody who owns the Xperia Ear and if so, what’s been their impression of it?