If you’ve got that music in your mind saying it’s gonna be alright, and you don’t want to take your earphones off, Bose’s latest pair could be for you.
Depending on how much you love music, you might just live in your earphones. They’re with you all the time because listening to your favourite tracks is as important as breathing. If this is you, we totally get it.
For many, the regularity of listening to something — music, video, radio, and podcast — is as important as life itself, and so it’s crucial to carry a pair of earphones or headphones with you. For some, there might be more than one pair in their bag just in case of one running out of battery power.
While portable audio has improved in leaps and bounds over the past few years making battery life less of a concern, the point remains that for many of us, carrying a great pair of earphones or headphones is just as important as carrying a phone itself.
You might love your phone and can’t be anywhere without it, but your earphones aren’t likely to be far behind.
And yet there are times when you have to take them off.
After a commute and into the office, even if you’re doing that sparingly, you probably still need to take your earphones out so you can hear everything else happening at work, or even life itself.
Bose may have a solution for that in a pair of fashionable earphones that look less like conventional earphones and more like a cuff-shaped ear-ring style of sorts, but for your ears, delivering music with an all-day focus so you don’t have to take them off.
Called the Bose Ultra Open Earbuds, they’ll use some of the audio technology found in the Bose Quite Comfort Ultra Earbuds, except without the noise cancellation tech used with the “Quiet Comfort” name.
There’s no noise cancellation here, but rather the opposite as Bose lets in the sound so you can hear the real world and your music together, complete with up to 7.5 hours of battery life in playback and up to 48 hours of life on standby.
The earphones offer a different design, holding onto your ears in a cuff-shaped design, so you can wear accessories with them, such as a pair of glasses, a scarf, or even a hat.
They’re technically not the first take on an open-ear pair of earphones made to be worn all the time, but they may be the first pair to try this idea that doesn’t look like a pair of earphones at all, and they come with an extra spot of technology, too.
Much like what we saw on the QC Ultra Headphones, Bose is including spatial sound, using the company’s take on “immersive audio” which is head-tracked and works with any sound service, not just the head-tracked music on Apple Music.
Granted, you’ll lose some battery life using Bose Immersive Audio on the Ultra Open Earbuds, cutting it from 7.5 to 4.5 hours, but the technology can help audio travel with you, offering two immersive audio modes of still and motion for head-tracked playback.
Bose is also including a feature in the app that can automatically adjust the volume of what you listen to based on your surroundings, something a pair of always-worn earbuds might find useful, much like the adaptive mode found on Apple’s AirPods and what the Google Pixel Buds were designed with.
“We know people want a way to listen to their music while still being connected to the world around them,” said Raza Haider, Chief Product Officer at Bose.
“We set out to completely reimagine the future of wearable audio and deliver a better, more beautiful, and comfortable solution to provide the best of both worlds,” he said. “The Bose Ultra Open Earbuds do just that. Now you can enjoy your music and life, all at the same time.”
With a unique style, the Bose Ultra Open Earbuds are definitely different from the premium noise cancelling norm of high-end earphones that we see, though they’re also priced like other high-end noise cancelling earphones.
In Australia, the Bose Ultra Open Earbuds will cost $449.95, with availability found across the country now.
