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- Comfortable, easy-to-forget fit
- Good water resistance
- Compact, practical charging case
- Sound requires EQ adjustment
- Inelegant controls
- Worse battery life than OpenFit alternatives
The Shokz OpenFit Air 2 have a lot to live up to. Their stablemates, the Shokz OpenFit 2+, won Best Open-Ear Headphones at our Product of the Year Awards in January, while the Shokz OpenFit Pro earned a five-star review the same month.
The OpenFit Air 2 don’t try to improve on those headphones. Instead, they complement them, offering open-ear freedom and an exercise-friendly design at a more accessible price. This design isn’t for everyone. I personally prefer traditional true wireless earbuds or clip-on buds like the Shokz OpenDots 2, but when it comes to stability, earhooks are king.
How much do they cost?
The OpenFit Air 2 are available in three colours, Ice Blue, White and Black, and cost £129, making them the cheapest open-ear earhook headphones from the Chinese brand. Its top-of-the-range OpenFit Pro cost £219, while the Shokz OpenFit 2+ cost £179. Shokz no longer sells the OpenFit 2, presumably to push those wanting an entry-level model towards the Air 2.
What features do they have?
The OpenFit Air 2 borrow heavily from their predecessors, but make a few concessions to hit a lower price. Both the Noise Reduction tech that reduces external distractions found on the OpenFit Pro and Dolby Audio support are absent. Shokz also dropped its DirectPitch audio technology, which focuses sound into your ear canals.
The Air 2 include a couple of proprietary bass-enhancing technologies, however. The first, Bassphere, refers to the driver arrangement inside each earbud. Rather than using a single driver, Shokz pairs two 11.8mm speakers in a dual-driver setup that it claims delivers the output of one 16mm driver.
The second is the OpenBass 2.0 AI algorithm, which enhances the buds’ bass response and aims to balance output consistently across the frequency range, regardless of volume level and environmental conditions.
Free of fancy features
Aside from that, the OpenFit Air 2 are pretty threadbare on the features front. They support Bluetooth 6.1 and multipoint pairing with two devices, though they only support SBC and AAC codecs.
In the Shokz app, you can ping the buds to make them emit a high-pitched sound to help you locate one or both if you’ve misplaced them. There are four EQ presets to choose from (Standard, Vocal, Bass and Private) and a five-band graphic equaliser to create your own tunings. Plus, you can see how much battery capacity is remaining in both the buds and charging case.
Shokz claims a total battery life of up to 36 hours, with the earbuds lasting roughly eight hours on a single charge. The buds got me through a full day of listening at my desk, and after 20 hours total use, the case still had 40% charge remaining, so those figures seem spot on. However, the OpenFit Pro (50 hours) and Fit 2+ (48 hours) beat the OpenFit Air 2 here.
They also omit the wireless charging available on those more expensive options. This isn’t surprising, though, as it’s an easy way to cut costs on entry-level headphones.
How I tested the Shokz OpenFit Air 2
I used the Shokz OpenFit Air 2 for a month, swapping them in and out with several other pairs of headphones I was testing at the time. My listening environments included a home office, the park, central London, the Expert Reviews office, and public transport.
I listened to a wide variety of music genres to assess the sound quality of the earbuds and kept a note of my usage to evaluate the manufacturer’s battery life claims. I extensively tested the physical controls of the Air 2 for responsiveness and ease of use, and I spent several hours experimenting with different EQ presets and my own custom profiles.
How comfortable are they?
The OpenFit Air 2 may not be as advanced as their OpenFit stablemates in several areas, but they’re my favourite OpenFit headphones for design and comfort. For starters, they’re Shokz’s lightest earhook design to date. At 7.2g, they’re 2g lighter than the OpenFit 2+ and over 4g less than the OpenFit Pro. This makes a noticeable difference to how they feel when worn. They’re less obtrusive and cumbersome, and it’s far easier to forget you have them on.
They’re no less stable, either. If anything, the sections of the buds that sit in front of your ear canals move around less during exercise than they do with the OpenFit Pro. Those buds have a more serious, professional look, but the Air 2’s clean, compact design is ideal for gym sessions and runs. The Ice Blue variant I was sent have a pearlescent finish similar to the OpenDots Air, which I’m a big fan of. If I’m going to wear headphones with hooks dangling over the back of my ears, I’d at least like to bring some colour to proceedings.
Cracking the case
The Air 2’s slender design means its charging case is more compact. The Pro’s case is enormous, and while the 2+’s case isn’t as big, it still takes up a reasonable amount of room in your pocket. Here, the case is relatively light (46g) and easily slips into most pockets. This made a practical difference to me. While the Pro’s case just about fits in the zipped pocket of my running shorts, there’s no room for anything else, like my keys. With the Air 2, I can squeeze in both.
The Air 2’s case is the only one in the lineup to have its own IP rating (IP54). It’s no use the earbuds being water-resistant (they are IP55-rated) if they’re in a non-waterproof case when it rains, so this is awesome to see.
How easy are they to control?
The control setup is my least favourite aspect of the OpenFit Air 2. Both earbuds have a pressure-sensitive button in the middle of the section that sits in front of your ears, which I didn’t find particularly easy to use.
The Air 2’s pressure-sensitive surfaces are larger but less prominent than on the Pro model, and I found that sliding my fingers slightly further back on the buds was more fiddly. Once you’ve got your finger on the buttons, they do work well, though.
The key commands, Play/Pause, Next Track and Previous Track, are covered by single, double- and triple-presses, while press-and-hold gestures adjust volume. The system is fully customisable in the Shokz app, and you can adjust the buttons’ sensitivity, which is nice.
How good is the sound quality?
The OpenFit Air 2 do sound good, but they are a step down from the OpenFit 2+ and OpenFit Pro. In the Standard preset, the Air 2 deliver mids and treble very capably. Taylor Swift’s vocals on Patient Zero were clean and characterful, and the instruments were reasonably well separated. The soundstage had surprising breadth, and I picked up background details with relative ease at 70% volume.
The Air 2 definitely have a volume sweet spot, though. At 50%, I struggled to hear much beyond the bright vocals and trebles, even in a quiet room, but I got a better sense of the overall sonic picture as I increased the volume above 70%. Out in the wild, I was often near maximum volume. The Air 2 go loud, which means they’re audible in noisier environments, but that’s not necessarily good for your long-term hearing.
The Air 2 do have a nice sense of rhythmic expression. While getting in the mood for GTA 6 by listening to E.G. Daily’s banger Shake It Up from Grand Theft Auto III (and Scarface), the buds delivered the song’s up-tempo, synth-heavy 80s club energy with great enthusiasm.
A decent stab at low-end impact
The low-end frequencies aren’t the deepest or fullest, but with the Bass preset engaged and volume at the sweet spot, they delivered a tidy punch of low end. The bass on Renegade P.A.’s DnB classic Terrorist rumbled along pleasantly, although that may be damning with faint praise, as the Air 2 weren’t truly able to articulate the track’s full dynamic range.
I encourage you to use the customisable in-app EQ for an optimal audio experience, as you can easily elevate the Standard tuning with a few simple equaliser adjustments. Steer well clear of the Vocal mode for anything other than podcasts and audiobooks, though. This restricts and compresses everything (except voices) so much that it felt like I had my head in a fish tank.
Should you buy the Shokz OpenFit Air 2?
With the OpenFit Pro, Shokz made a valiant and great-sounding attempt to solve the biggest issue with open-ear headphones: ambient noise. In doing so, it hoped to make a pair of open-ear headphones that could be everything for everyone.
The Shokz OpenFit Air 2 aren’t that, and aren’t designed to be. These headphones are aimed at a specific niche, and they fill it adroitly. First and foremost, they nail the design brief. No other open-ear earhook headphones I’ve worn are as unobtrusive and comfy. Their IP55 rating means they’re well protected from the elements, and the relatively compact charging case is water-resistant, which is a nice touch.
And although they’re far from being stellar sonic performers, they deliver enough energy, power and musical expression to be an enjoyable listen during workouts and runs, especially after a bit of EQ tweaking. As a cut-price alternative to their more advanced siblings, only the control system lets them down, but even that isn’t a disaster.
