You gotta love it when a company scoops itself. Shokz — the maker of some excellent bone-conduction headphones like the OpenRun Pro, the OpenFit and OpenFit Air, as well as the latest water-centric OpenSwim Pro — is teasing a new set of headphones coming August 28. A video teaser pretty clearly shows something in the OpenRun Pro sort of category.
The teaser on the Shokz website also comes with a link to enter to win whatever it is Shokz is set to announce. Click it, and you can clearly see a box for the Shokz OpenRun Pro 2 with a tagline that reads “redefining the sound of sports.”
Guess that makes it official.
We can’t yet say for certain exactly what’s in the new kit, but the basic design looks to be the same as the original OpenRun Pro (which themselves were basically a minor update to the old Aeropex, from when the company was known as Aftershokz). This sort of headphones works by using the bones in your skull as the mechanism to get sound to your ears, instead of using a more traditional speaker that moves air. And it’s always worked surprisingly well, even if the audio quality isn’t nearly the same as what you’d get from traditional earbuds or headphones.
Why use bone conduction, then? Because it leaves your ears unblocked, allowing you to hear everything that’s going on around you. That’s key for folks who are exercising on the streets, like runners and cyclists. And that’s also the sort of use case in which you don’t need (or expect) pristine audio quality.
In any event, there’s not much more info to glean from the teaser. The giveaway says it’s a $250 gift box, including “new Shokz flagship headphones,” a cap, and a fanny pack (erm, “waist bag,” they’re calling it). Shokz is giving away 10 of these gift packs.
And for everything else, we’ll just have to wait until August 28.
