No more excuses. These headphones are perfect. I’ve been looking for the right way to listen to music while I swim. I wanted to break them in a bit to be sure. I can now recommend them.
SHOKZ OpenSwim Pro – Open-Ear Bluetooth Headphones & 32GB MP3 Player, IP68 Waterproof, Bone Conduction Headphones, Secure Fit for Workouts, Running and Swimming, Built-in Microphone, App. Available in gray and red.
I bought these and have been using them now for 3 weeks. I’d previously bought some Shokz for cycling so I knew what to expect with bone conductive sound. The battery life seems good. I’m still on the first charge. The sound is great. The controls are easy to use by feel. I press and hold one button to power on and then press two buttons to switch to MP3 mode. Loading the music from my old music library was as easy as copying the files to the mounted flash drive. It came with a nose plug and ear plugs. I tried the ear plugs and immediate ordered some replacements as I could not get them out. I ended up getting some WaterDam Swimming Ear Plugs and they are working fine — and I can remove them.
For years I have used a combination of a waterproofed Apple iPod Shuffle and SX10 headphones from H2O Audio. This combination worked pretty good. The iPod was from a company called Waterproof iPod. They would buy new iPods and inject them with hydrophobic material around all of the electronic components while still allowing the buttons and headphone jack to work. The buttons were still but worked well. This was great at a time when all of my music was in iTunes and could be sync’d up whenever I plugged it in to charge. At some point, the music go frozen in time so I find my self listening to playlists curated in 2010. The paired H2O audio headphones worked pretty good but I would inevitably get water past the headphone and it would muffle the sound in one ear. I just got used to listing to my music in one ear. The whole kit is small. Battery life is insane. The shuffle clips onto my goggles with a short cord to each year. The first one I bought failed after several years and I bought the ISH4-5A1 as a replacement in 2010 but ended up coming back to the Waterproof Shuffle as a better solution.
Before that I used H2O Audio’s H2O Audio ISH4-5A1 that would hold an iPod Shuffle 3rd Generation (chicklet). I bought this thinking it would be an upgrade to the Waterproof Shuffle. It promised to be a more elegant solution as I was a standard iPad inside the water proof case. In the end, I didn’t like the setup. The Shuffle gave no controls for fast forward or rewind.
Today H2O Audio has the TRI Multi-Sport Waterproof Bone Conduction Headphones that compete with the SHOKZ. I have not tried the TRI but suspect they are strong competition for SHOKZ.
