The Sony WH-1000XM4 is set to succeed the rather excellent Sony WH-1000XM3, and some killer leakage features could make these great headphones even better

As one of the best wireless headphones you can buy, the Sony WH-1000XM3 impressed us with its excellent audio quality and class-leading active noise cancellation However, Twitter user justplayinghard broke down the Sony Headphones Connect APK and revealed some interesting smart features that the WH-1000XM4 is expected to have

A teardown of the Android Application Package reveals that the Sony WH-1000XM4 can connect to two devices at once, allowing the wearer to switch devices on the fly It's a small thing, but disconnecting the WH-1000XM3 from one device and connecting it to another can be a hassle, and the next generation of wireless headphones will eliminate that hassle in one fell swoop [That's because the WH-1000XM4 loses the ability to use the high-res audio LDAC codec when paired with multiple devices However, the ability to easily swap between two devices may be worth the loss of audio fidelity in certain scenarios

APK Teardown also revealed that the WH-1000XM4 will have enhanced audio upscaling through the use of an upscaler called "DSEE Extreme" This appears to be an upgrade of the Sony WH-1000XM3's DSEE HX upscaler

Another interesting feature that the WH-1000XM4 will get is a "smart talking" feature, according to XDA Developers, who confirmed justplayinghard's findings in their own teardown, this feature will allow the headphones to detect voice and The ambient sound mode of the headphones will be automatically activated, they said This means that background sounds are filtered through the noise-canceling headphones and the wearer can hear the converted sounds without having to remove the headphones

The WH-1000XM3 can be set to pick up some audio using the ambient sound setting Similarly, covering the right ear can be used to temporarily disable active noise cancellation and bring in ambient sound However, this feature is not always intuitive, and the WH-1000XM4 could greatly improve on this

Finally, the WH-1000XM4 is expected to use Google Maps data to cleverly adjust the headphone settings according to the wearer's location and when entering a predefined area This would be a significant upgrade over the WH-1000XM3, which requires manual registration of ambient noise locations

Sony's WH-1000XM4 design is not expected to change much, but the headphones are a significant upgrade in smarts over the WH-1000XM3 and could be an even stronger competitor to the class-leading Bose 700 Any further judgment, however, will have to wait until the wireless headphones are released Sadly, no release date was revealed in the APK teardown