The latest earbud design coming out of Bose is a new take on the gadget that tries to balance exterior sound with your music.
The new earbuds are called ‘Bose Sport Open Earbuds,’ and they sort of hook around the rear of your ear and then rest just inside your ear lobe, leaving your ear canal unobstructed so you can hear the outside world and your music simultaneously.
While many headphones offer a passthrough mode that allows users to artificially hear the outside world through their headphones, the new option from Bose promises to be more natural sounding since both the music and ambient room noise are naturally picked up by your ears instead of being converted through mics and speakers.
Bose says that this setup works just as well as regular headphones and doesn’t compromise privacy, so people can’t hear what you’re listening to.
The Sport Open Earbuds have an eight-hour battery life, and the included case doesn’t charge them. Instead, you’ll need to take them home and plug them into an included charging dock to recharge them. It takes three hours to recharge these buds.
The earbuds cost $249 in Canada and you can pre-order them starting today. The Bose website says they’ll begin shipping on January 20th.
Bose is lucky that it priced these headphones so low since I can’t see people picking them up as their everyday headphones since they don’t come with a charging case. That said, for $250, they could be a nice splurge if you spend a lot of time working out or doing some other activity that requires you to hear your surroundings.
I can vouch for the concept of these headphones being useful. I do like the ability to hear my surroundings when I’m biking and I found the passthrough mode on the Galaxy Buds+ and the cool semi-in ear design of the Skullcandy Push Ultra to both be good options.
That said, if Bose has really stumbled onto a way to make the new SportOpen Earbuds sound fantastic, they might just blow the competition out of the water.
Source: Bose
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