Crown, Flip, Freedom.

It’s 4:30 p.m., call number six of the day. My ears are glowing like two little radiators, and somewhere in the back of my head a voice whispers: “Just one more meeting.” Anyone who spends their days in Teams knows the feeling. Over-ear headsets turn your head into a sauna. In-ears turn your ear canals into a construction site. Honestly, I was close to doing my calls via laptop speaker. (My colleagues would not have thanked me.)

The second date.

Enter the Shokz OpenMeet 2. Shokz – the people who make bone conduction headphones for joggers – wants to come to the office. Well, they tried once before: the first OpenMeet even won a CES Innovation Award in 2025. Great idea, slightly wobbly execution. Literally. Testers reported that a quick nod, bending down for a pen or a hearty sneeze was enough to send the thing sliding forward. Even Shokz admitted it at InfoComm 2026. Points for honesty.

Holds. Finally.

The second generation fixes exactly that. The new system is called GlideFit (of course it has a trademark name), and it’s essentially two flexible little “horns” that hug your head just above the ears. The clip-on temple pads from Gen 1? Gone. Nobody will miss them. The headband is now padded with memory foam and protein leather, the cable that used to be visible at the transition has disappeared inside the band, and the whole thing weighs a feather-light 77.9 grams.

My personal stress test: the dash to the coffee machine, a quick dive under the desk for the charging cable. It stays put. My sun glasses? Untouched (Yes, I used OpenMeet 2 a lot this hot summer). My ears? Free. Nothing presses, nothing heats up. People with behind-the-ear hearing aids reportedly love it for the very same reason.

Microphone Quality?

Please let me know what you think about it, hear my voice sample below

Flip it, mute it.

Now my favorite feature – and I’m not exaggerating. The doorbell rings mid-call. The parcel service, naturally. With the old model, you had to fumble for a tiny mute button at the tip of the mic. Now: flip the mic arm up past 90 degrees and you’re muted. Flip it down and you’re back. Blind, intuitive, simple.

The second highlight sits on the right side: a knurled volume dial that feels like the crown of a mechanical watch. Turning up the volume suddenly feels luxurious. And a red busylight tells everyone in the open-plan office: “He’s on a call. Please don’t ask about lunch now.”

Sound check.

Bone conduction plus air conduction – Shokz calls it DualPitch. The air conduction driver has grown from 11 × 18 to 11 × 21 millimeters, which means fuller mids and a bit more body. Voices sound warm, especially in “Vocal Booster” mode, and a podcast between meetings is genuinely fun. Techno bass? Not here. It’s an open design, and physics is physics. Your desk neighbor hears nothing, by the way – LeakSlayer takes care of that. (What names there are!)

Psst – the little trick.

The AI microphone filters out up to 99.4 percent of background noise: keyboard clatter, café chatter, barking dogs. The app offers three levels: low, medium, high. Here’s the insider tip from your little headset service blog: choose “low.” On medium and high, the AI is so eager that it occasionally swallows sharp hissing sounds at the end of words – one reviewer noticed the “ch” in “arch” going missing. On low, everything sounds natural, and the background noise is still gone.

Battery, boringly good.

16 hours of listening, 12 hours of talk time. That’s two hours less talk time than the predecessor, because the AI is working hard. In everyday life? Irrelevant. One tester got from Tuesday to Friday on a single charge. And five minutes on USB-C gives you two hours of calls. Add Bluetooth 6.0 and multipoint – laptop and smartphone at the same time. For companies, the UC version with the Loop120 dongle is the way to go: certified for Zoom and Webex, compatible with Teams.

And the price?

$249.95 for the UC version, around 295 euros in Germany. Not a bargain. If you already own the first OpenMeet and spend your days sitting calmly at your desk, you don’t need to upgrade – Gen 1 now starts at around 113 euros. But anyone who moves, gestures and sneezes (so, all of us) gets the more grown-up headset with Gen 2. One more thing: there’s no IP rating. So it’s not for jogging in the rain. It’s for the office. Which is precisely the point.

My verdict

Call number six is still call number six. But my ears go into the weekend relaxed. Speaking of which – have a wonderful weekend. And take your headset off. All of them.

Get your Shokz OpenMeet 2 Headset in our Bechtle Shop here.