• UK government cracks down on people who annoy others with phone music
• Fines of up to £100 for those people
• It's cheaper to just buy these headphones

People who play music, TikTok videos or out-loud video calls on public transport probably aren't self-aware enough to know how annoying it is, but apparently the UK government does, because it's finally cracking down on so-called "headphone dodgers".

From next Monday, transport authorities will be allowed to fine rule-breakers by up to £100 if they're causing a nuisance. Prime Minister Andy Burnham is fronting the campaign, after previous governments toyed with the idea.

It's a good idea, but the success is dependent on enforcement, as transport safety officers and not drivers are expected to hand out the fines. Given how minimally-staffed most public transport services are, some (me) are dubious that the rules will make a difference.

However if you've been a 'headphone dodger' and you want to turn a new leaf (good on you), it'd make sense to buy a pair of headphones that cost much less than the £100 penalty fare.

And naturally, we've tested a few that we can recommend…

Sennheiser CX 80U

Starting with something nice and cheap, we've got some wired earbuds, which you can easily plug into the USB-C port on a phone and keep bundled up in your pocket the rest of the time. No Bluetooth dropouts, no losing a bud as you board the bus, no apps, none of that.

The Sennheiser CX 80U sound great, block surrounding noise quite well, and offer a nice simple design. We gave them 4.5 stars out of 5 in our review, only knocking them for some missing features of pricier buds.

Best of all, though, they're really cheap. They launched for $39.95 / £34.99 in January this year, but you can find them even a little cheaper than that on Amazon.

Sony WH-CH530 (or even the Sony WH-CH730N)

If you want great-value headphones, you can't go wrong with a pair from Sony, and its recently-released Sony WH-CH530N are really affordable at $69 / £50.

We haven't yet finished testing these on-ears, they're that new, but their predecessors the WH-CH520 got 4.5 stars in our review. We praised the balanced sound and long-lasting battery, and the newer pair will likely bring improvements.

As you can see in the picture, they come in a wide range of colors, and also have noise cancellation, which isn't something you can say about all options at this price point.

Prefer over-ears? Go for the just-reviewed, all-new Sony WH-CH730N: a solid four stars and they're just under that £99 (or equivalent, in your country of residence) fine line, if you'll pardon the pun…

JLab JBuds Mini ANC

Last, but not least, let's look at some standard wireless noise-cancelling earbuds, which we got to try earlier this year.

The JLab JBuds Mini ANC are tiny — you can even clip the case onto your keyring — so you've got no excuse for not having buds on the bus. At $49.99 / £49.99 they won't break the bank either.

We enjoyed the non-ANC JLab JBuds Mini too, when they came out three years ago, and they're ideal for people who want lightweight buds.

Have further thoughts? Drop us a comment — or better yet, fill out the poll below this text and then add your comment!

• Huawei's new Kirin 9050 Pro is being called its "most powerful" all-Chinese chip tech giant has ever made
• Huawei is claiming a 55% density gain by 'folding' its chip in half and stacking it instead of shrinking the actual die
• The chip still uses US hardware and foreign technology to manufacture, including ASML scanners and pre-2022 Applied Materials and Lam Research equipment

Huawei has introduced the Kirin 9050 Pro, a mobile processor that it says is fully free of American technology.

The chip powers the Mate XT 2, the third device in the company's tri-fold line, which starts at 19,999 yuan (~$2,980), and went on sale in China on September 12 2026.

The South China Morning Post noted Huawei is reducing reliance on advanced foreign semiconductor equipment, and this might be what the state-backed AI and chip giant wanted to highlight above all else, even as it refused to mention sanctions anywhere in its own press materials.

An impressive SoC that continues to indicate a shrinking technological gap

Richard Yu, chairman of Huawei's consumer business group, said on stage that the Kirin 9050 Pro is the company's "most powerful Kirin chip ever" and, based on the performance figures, touts a 42% overall improvement over the last-gen Mate XTs' Kirin 9020.

At the chip level, it claims 24% higher peak single-core and 52% better multi-core throughput against the Kirin 9030 Pro, plus a 142% jump in graphics rendering. The nine-core LinxiCore CPU peaks at 3.1GHz, the Maleoon GPU adds hardware ray tracing, and the Da Vinci NPU runs a 30-billion-parameter mixture-of-experts model on device.

The performance figures alone aren't the only interesting thing about Huawei's new silicon offering; the Kirin 9050 Pro is the first commercial silicon built on LogicFolding, a technique Huawei semiconductor chief He Tingbo presented at IEEE ISCAS in Shanghai in May and expanded on in a signed paper.

Rather than shrinking transistors, LogicFolding splits logic across two active silicon layers bonded face to face, with roughly 50 million vertical interconnects at a pitch of about 1.5 micrometers. Because signals travel shorter distances, Huawei says it could lower operating voltage while raising density.

However, all of these figures (including performance) come directly from Huawei, with no independent verification or peer-reviewed studies. More interestingly, while the Kirin is considerably less dependent on US or Western tech, it doesn't remove it from the equation entirely, and you still have to look closely at the bill of materials for receipts.

Huawei did not announce a process node for the Kirin 9050 Pro, and that silence has been deafening in more ways than one. SemiAnalysis tore down the predecessor in June 2026 and found SMIC's third-generation 7nm process, N+3, reaching about 113 million transistors per square millimeter with no extreme ultraviolet lithography anywhere in the flow.

SMIC's process, however, still leverages ASML immersion scanners. Bloomberg reported in 2024 that SMIC built the earlier Kirin 9000s using equipment acquired from Applied Materials and Lam Research before the October 2022 export rules closed that door, and the same is still in play here.

Despite this, Huawei has come a long way since its phones were declared America-free seven years ago. A UBS and Fomalhaut Techno Solutions analysis seen by the Wall Street Journal in late 2019 found the Mate 30 Pro contained no American parts, and Huawei cybersecurity officer John Suffolk told the paper that "all of our 5G is now America-free." The Kirin 990 inside that phone, however, was fabricated by TSMC on an EUV node.

Huawei's approach, backed by the Chinese state, to essentially rid itself of US influence in the fabrication end of the spectrum remains more of an ongoing struggle than one which it has already achieved, even as it continues to push ahead in certain disciplines and erode a performance gap that industry players earlier thought would take years longer than it is now projected to.