Marathon season in Australia is in full swing, with a few events already out of the way so far and more coming up in the next few months, including the prestigious Sydney Marathon in August.
The EOFY sales couldn’t come at a more perfect time for runners looking to upgrade their gear, and we’ve spotted a few tech deals that should fit the bill, like the record-breaking Garmin Forerunner 55 to track your runs and this massage gun for recovery. But the best one I’ve found is for the Shokz OpenRun Pro 2, which we called our best headphones for runners here at TechRadar.
Amazon has the OpenRun Pro 2 discounted by 25% to bring the price down to AU$239, which is also the lowest we’ve seen it from the retailer. It’s also even made it to the bestseller list under the electronics category.
As a seasoned cyclist and occasional runner, I love using bone conduction headphones for solo training sessions, where I can blast some tunes to get the blood flowing or listen to a podcast, all while being fully aware of my surroundings.
I’ve found that open-ear headphones like the Shokz OpenFit range deliver better sound quality, but they struggle in windy conditions and during bike rides. Bone conduction, on the other hand, sends sound vibrations through the bones in your skull instead of through the air, making it more resilient in those instances.
What Shokz did with the OpenRun Pro 2 is bring both technologies together to improve audio quality so it won’t vibrate too aggressively at higher volumes, which happens in pure bone conduction headphones like the OpenRun. It also has an option to switch to purely bone conduction mode in windy conditions.
Speaking of the base OpenRun, the Pro 2 has a USB-C charger instead of the proprietary magnetic one found in the latter, which I would consider a quality-of-life upgrade.
That said, the OpenRun is also discounted to AU$149 on Amazon if you’re not too fussed about audio quality, and it also has a better IP67 rating for dust and water protection than the Pro 2’s IP55, which can’t be fully submerged in water and won’t be fully dust-tight.
