My Experience with Philips 9040s (Costco)

Are the 9050 actually available? They’re not at the Costcos in our area.

@LisaD Welcome to the forum.

As far as I know, the 9050 isn’t available yet, but reading from this forum, it should be available within 6 months or so.

There are no firm dates. Just speculation.

The Bluetooth issue was never resolved. If anything, it got worse. Last week, I was able to return the 9040s. I was just outside the six-month window from the order date. I’ve ordered a pair of the 9050s and will pick them up late next week. I’m hoping the Bluetooth issue is resolved. In the interim, I’ve been wearing my previous hearing aids, KS10s. The Bluetooth works flawlessly, but the voice recognition quality is nowhere near as good. I feel like I’m underwater.

I tried 9040s for a week or two. I couldn’t pair them to the TV streamer. I called Philips tech support and they gave a whole song and dance about the steps to preform to connect the TV streamer. After they were done, the connection was good. Later that day, I tried to use it again and the connection had already failed. After using the aids for about 4 hours, I questioned if losing 25% of battery for that time period is typical and was told that it was.

I was reaching the end of my trial period for Jabra 20s and the plan was to keep the 9040s and return the Jabras. As poor as the Jabras are, they are better for me than the 9040s were.

The Jabras I got at Costco were the first time I have gotten new aids that neither had improved features or intelligiblity.

I got exceptionally good battery life with mine. I could stream for hours and still have plenty of power left.

And I’m very happy with my Jabra EP20s (from Costco). I don’t stream LOT (a couple hours a day), so I can’t argue the point, but I think they generally do well and offer reasonable features. They always seem to have a lot of juice left when I plug them in at night.

Had my 9050’s for only one day and already I don’t think I am going to like them. I have the opposite problem to them being too loud. My KS10’s have a more open and natural sound than the Philips, which seem to have a more occluded sound. I often control the volume level of my of my aids via the rocker switches, as I don’t carry my phone with me 24/7. The left aid switch is volume up and the right volume down, again the KS10’s for me are easier controlling up or down from either aid. The aid itself is smaller than the KS10, and wearing glasses, I find it a lot more difficult to locate the switch.

Not so far tried any streaming with the audio clip, my phone is not LE compatible.

I’m not a tech expert, but from I’ve read here and elsewhere there are so many, many possible adjustments on modern hearing aids that almost any of these complaints could be resolved by the services of a good hearing-aid-technician/audiologist.

@DrBob said:

handoff between IOS devices is not reliable and the best way is to turn off Bluetooth on device number one before switching to device number two.

I had to resort to this technique this morning. It worked. I was very glad to finally remember it, after struggling for days to connect my iPhone w Jabra10s.

I suspect that this is more of an IOS issue than an HA issue.