Shokz OpenRun Pro 2 Review: £169 Buys the Road in Your Ears

What arrives for £169, and what does not

The carton holds the headphones, a USB-C cable, a carrying bag and the product box. That bag is the first difference a British buyer will notice: Shokz's American page lists a carrying case, and the UK page lists a bag. Nothing in the box goes into a wall socket, so the charger is yours to supply; Shokz recommends 5V at 1A and warns against anything above 15V.

The colour run is shorter than the American one. Black and Orange appear in both band sizes, and Shokz adds a Kipchoge edition at £169 and two TCS London Marathon editions at £179. The Silver, Blue and Lunar White pairs sold in the US are not on the UK store. The band itself is one loop of nickel-titanium inside a silicone frame, with no adjuster, which is why Standard and Mini are chosen at checkout and cannot be changed later.

There is one fewer step below it than American buyers get. The OpenRun sits at £129.95 with 8 hours, IP67 and 26.4 g, and the first-generation OpenRun Pro — $159.95 in the US, with 10 hours and the same IP55 — has no page on the UK store. So the UK decision is £129.95 or £169, a £39.05 gap rather than the $20 one.

The open ear is the product and the compromise

There is no mode to switch into awareness, because the canal was never closed. A bus pulling out, a van passing close on a narrow lane, the gym's own playlist: all of it arrives under the music. For a runner on an unlit road that is the feature being paid for. For a passenger on a train it is the reason to buy something else.

The cost shows up as volume. On a quiet towpath the limit is the battery; beside a dual carriageway the street sets the level, and the app's EQ presets become a way of pushing bass rather than of tuning it. The air driver sits outside the ear with nothing to contain it, so the louder the street the more low end escapes towards whoever is next to you. Shokz describes the pair as leak-free; no measurement on either page supports the word.

Why there are two drivers, and what the second one changes

Bone conduction works by moving the skull, which is why it survives a canal full of water and why bass is the harder half for it. DualPitch keeps that driver for mids and highs and adds an air-conduction unit outside the ear for the low end. Shokz's UK page describes a custom algorithm splitting the signal between the two, with the bone driver carrying clarity and the air driver carrying what the page calls surging bass.

The UK page also lists four presets — Standard, Vocal, Bass Boost and Treble Boost — plus two slots of your own. It does not name the Classic mode that the American page presents as the way to hear the older bone-only sound, so a British buyer cannot rely on that demonstration. What the second driver cannot do is close the gap to a sealed pair: a driver inside a closed cup moves far more air than a band resting against a cheekbone, and no preset changes that.

Twelve hours, with the condition finally printed

Shokz's UK footnote is unusually specific: 12 hours with the volume at 75 per cent, playing WAV files in a room held at 25±2°C, every other feature at default. That is a real operating point rather than a best case, and it still leaves the maximum-volume runtime unpublished. Quick Charge now has a figure too — five minutes for 150 minutes of SBC playback under the same conditions — where the American page gives none.

The water rating is IP55 to IEC 60529: dust protected and safe against low-pressure jets. Shokz is explicit that this covers rain and sweat and not the sea, a sauna or a shower, and that the rating fades with wear. The charging advice is the practical part: dry the port before connecting, do not plug in straight after a sweaty session, and push the silicone cover back down afterwards. Shokz's American FAQ adds that the cover sometimes needs more pressure than expected to seat, which makes it the one part of the rating a buyer can get wrong.

Bluetooth is 5.3 with a stated 10-metre range, and the pair holds two devices at once through multipoint. The microphone claim is a 96.5 per cent reduction in ambient noise, from a simulated street crossing with about 29 dB of signal-to-noise improvement; the wind test was a rider at 25 km/h on a closed road with no wind. Neither is a recording of a real commute, and Shokz's own troubleshooting lists a muffled microphone as a known result of sweat in the mesh.

The 30 days are the fitting room

Two band sizes, chosen once, decide where the bone driver lands on the cheekbone, and that contact point is the whole acoustic coupling. Shokz publishes a head-circumference guide rather than an adjuster. The two fit questions the specification does not answer are glasses — the hooks pass over the temple — and a helmet, whose rear cradle wants the same space behind the head as the band.

The UK store gives 30 days to return the pair for a refund and a 24-month warranty, against 45 days and two years on the American store. Thirty days is comfortably longer than the 14-day cancellation right that applies to any online order under UK consumer law, and it is the window in which to test both fit cases. Separately, a fault that appears within six months has to be repaired or replaced by the retailer whether or not the warranty has run out.

On Amazon.co.uk the seller is SHOKZ Store and the listing shows Amazon's own return terms, 30 days from receipt with the usual holiday extension, so at the same £169 the channel changes the returns route rather than the cover. The statutory rights run against whichever seller took the money.

When £129.95 is the better buy, and when nothing open is

The OpenRun at £129.95 gives up four hours of playback, the air driver and two generations of bone conduction (eighth against tenth), and takes on IP67 and a lighter 26.4 g frame. Anyone who mostly runs in the rain, or who has never been bothered by thin bass, is paying £39.05 for a second driver they will not notice. Anyone who has tried bone conduction and found it hollow is the customer this pair was built for.

Quiet is the case no setting can answer. A flight, a train carriage or a shared office needs a sealed in-ear with noise cancelling, and that pair gives up the traffic awareness that makes the Shokz worth carrying. Covering both means owning both; no open band does the sealing half. Swimmers should look at the OpenSwim Pro in Shokz's UK range rather than at either OpenRun, since neither is rated for immersion.

One last check before ordering: the Kipchoge edition costs the same £169 as the standard pair, and the two London Marathon editions cost £10 more. Nothing in the specification separates them, so the standard black or orange pair is the value.