Photo gallery: Bose Mobile In-Ear HeadsetDesign and features
Just when you think you've seen everything, Bose comes along with in-ear headphones that look unlike anything we've seen before. In fact, if we had to describe them, it would be like describing a regular pair of in-ear headphones that had seen the underside of a steam roller. The ear bud is short and wide (like a flying saucer), with the speaker jutting out from the side covered in a silicon gel.
At first glance these don't look like comfortable headphones, but this couldn't be further from the truth. The silicon gels fit snuggly in our ears and feel as secure as any headphones we've tested, even though the speaker doesn't seem to sit as far in the ear canal as others do.
The Bose in-ear headphones feature a long cable with a 3.5mm headphone connection at the end. Bose also includes a variety of 2.5mm adapters for use with compatible devices, plus a small range of sizes for the silicon gels. Along the cable, just below the right ear headphone, you find a microphone with a single-click key. This turns these humble headphones into a mobile hands-free headset compatible with a wide range of mobile phones.
Performance
We could go into some detail about the Bose TriPort acoustic headphone structure or about the electro-acoustic design (actually we couldn't without a trip to Wikipedia), but it's probably just as easy to describe the excellent sound these tiny headphones produce. If you're familiar with headphones by competing brands you'll spot the difference immediately, a shift in focus from thumping bass to good, clear sound across the low, mid and high frequencies. While we love pounding bass line as much as the next person, we often find this attention to bass leaves the higher frequencies murky. However, these Bose in-ear headphones don't seem to favour one frequency or another, with the sharp snaps of a snare drum as prevalent as the thud of a kick drum.
What is most surprising about these headphones is the sound you don't hear, the bleeding of sound that usually drives fellow commuters crazy while you blast thrash metal on the train ride home from work. We were shocked when our nearest colleagues in the CNET offices told us they could "only barely" hear sound from the headphones even with the music up at full volume. God bless Bose.
Overall
The Bose mobile in-ear headset is a fantastic pair of headphones for those who love music, and for those who just have to sit close to them on the bus. Their AU$199 price tag is twice as much as our previous favourite mobile headphones, the Senheisser MM 50, but we think the extra is worth paying for. Perhaps you could take a collection at work to pay the difference, people are bound to throw in a fiver to not listen to the Spice Girls blaring from your cans during work hours.
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