What is the difference between openear and boneconduction headphones?
While openear earbuds have experienced a surge in popularity over the last year or so, boneconduction headphones have also been around on the market, particularly appealing to runners and those exercising outdoors where spatial awareness is essential.
Boneconduction headphones: You’ll notice that Shokz makes many of the most wellknown boneconduction headphones, but you can also pick up rivals from Suunto, H2O Audio, and Philips. These work via vibrations that they send into the listener’s cheekbones, leaving the outer ear completely exposed and delivering sound directly to the inner ear. It’s an excellent approach for awareness but has some downsides when it comes to sound quality.
Openear headphones: Alternatively, these designs do sit near the outer ear but are careful not to obscure it. Rather than sitting on the cheekbones, these will use hooks or clips to keep them in place near your ears. We find that the sound is more natural compared to a boneconduction approach, as these are essentially tiny speaker drivers outside your ears, so music playback naturally mixes with exterior sounds.
What to consider when buying openear earbuds
When shopping around for the best openear earbuds, there are several key specifications to consider. These are the crucial ones that we keep in mind, though:
Battery life
Many of these earbuds are designed for allday wear, so you’ll want to make sure that they have a battery life that works for that amount of time. Whether these are providing the soundtrack to your day out or allowing you to listen to audiobooks while waiting for the doorbell to ring, you’ll want to make sure they can stay powered on and play for several hours at a time. Most options in this category should deliver at least seven hours of uninterrupted playback, but some can manage double that.
Like other true wireless earphones, they’ll also top themselves back up with juice when you return them to their convenient charging cases. These may offer you two or three additional charges, so you shouldn’t have to worry about recharging them at the mains plug too often. When you do, it’s worth looking out for models that have a “quick charge” as this will tend to mean that they can restore several hours of playback from about ten minutes of being plugged in – ideal if you’ve run out of battery ahead of a long journey.
Water and dust resistance
This is important when looking for gadgets that you’ll use outside, whether you’re buying a portable speaker, a smartwatch or a phone.
Look for the “ingress protection” or “IP” rating. This will always feature “IP” followed by two numbers, such as “IP54”, and the first number (ranging from 0 to 6) indicates the level of protection against solids like dust while the second number (ranging from 0 to 9) tells you how sealed the device is from liquids like water. If you see a rating like IPX5, the “X” means that it hasn’t specifically been tested for dust protection while the “5” tells us that the gadget can deal with water splashes and some jets, so it will be reliable for use in light rain.
Shokz does make a waterproof boneconduction pair with a superprotective IP68 rating, but it is rare to find such a rating on openear designs at the moment.
Controls and ease of use
You’ll find controls on the earbuds themselves, and you can use these to take charge of the playback and access the features of the earbuds. These tend to be either touch controls or physical buttons, and while we tend to prefer the clicky responsiveness of buttons, it’s going to be a personal preference and a quick tap to change the song might be more convenient for runners.
Through these controls, you won’t only be able to skip ahead in your playlists, you may also be able to put the volume up or down, call on your smartphone’s voice assistant, or enter a more immersive mode with dynamic head tracking.
Companion apps
Like a lot of Bluetooth products nowadays, you’ll be able to link most openear earbuds to a companion app that you download on your phone. With this, you should be able to tweak controls, customise the sound signature and update the firmware on the buds to deal with any potential bugs or issues that the manufacturer notices.
While it’s possible to use the earbuds without the app at all, we’d always recommend having the app to troubleshoot any issues that you have and to get your earwear working exactly the way you’d like it to.
