Huawei FreeArc: hook, line, open-ear earbuds – Ultra-Sim

• 17 mm × 12 mm driver
• Touch controls
• Fully “open ear” design
• Ultra-light
• Does not conflict with glasses
• Case is big and wobbly
• IP57 resistance on buds only

Nothing Ear specs

Design and Comfort

Aw, it’s a heart (Image credit – PhoneArena)

The Huawei FreeArc buds come in a big, square-ish plastic case that feels a bit cheap, but does its job just fine. The size is one of the pills you have to swallow with this type of over-ear earbuds, since there’s just no other way to store and charge such a design. However, at least Nothing have us an elongated, flat case for the Ear (Open), which was more versatile in terms of fitting it in various types of pockets. The Huawei FreeArc case is definitely the bulkier package.

The buds themselves are pretty light and comfortable. The hooks are covered in soft silicone and have the bud batteries at their very end to act as counterweights. In general, you can wear these all day long and forget about them — they are light enough and do not interfere with the usage of glasses in our experience. They also hang on pretty tight and don’t feel like they are going to fall off no matter how hard we shake — they’ll do fine for sports.

They hang just outside your hears (Image credit – PhoneArena)

Controls are done with taps and swipes. A swipe forward or back for volume up / down. Double tap to play / pause or answer call. Tap and hold to reject call and triple tap for next song. That’s all.

Otherwise, they hang on and work just fine for jogging, skating, or even casual wear while working or doing chores at home.

Box… contents? There isn’t even a cable (Image credit – PhoneArena)

Sound Quality

You can’t expect miracles, can you? (Image credit – PhoneArena)

These Huawei FreeArc earbuds sound… OK. Credit given — it’s pretty hard to compete when the earphones are not delivering the sound directly into your ear canal.

Huawei has worked hard to boost bass — that’s an important thing to get right when the tiny drivers are sitting outside your ears. And, with bass, we truly have no complaints. It’s when you move up the frequency spectrum where these don’t sound ideal. They are a bit honky in the upper mids and there’s a clear lack of air in the high frequencies. So, while they do have bass, they can still sound inexplicably thin and nasally.

Not to a point where they sound outright bad, don’t get us wrong. Their sound is serviceable especially considering their use case and the niche — these are earbuds for people that insist to also be hearing the environment. Therefore absolutely pristine audio quality is not a priority. So, they can do fine to play music in “elevator music” volume in the background, or your favorite podcast, or a YouTube video.

Huawei advertises that they minimize sound bleed, but it’s still there. Raising the volume of your favorite song to “moderately loud” will make it audible to people sitting close to you in the office. Again, it comes with the territory with these open-ear earbuds.

There is a Huawei AI Life app, which you can download from the App Store but not Play Store, which allows you access to three more EQ profiles. They don’t sound much better, and we preferred sticking with the default one.

Mic quality is as OK as it gets with Bluetooth earbuds. It’s a bit muffled, but mostly clear with not a lot of digital artifacts attached to it. Callers were able to understand us more often than not, and didn’t complain about the sound more often than with other Bluetooth earbuds.

Conclusion

At least they are hard to lose, right? (Image credit – PhoneArena)

Overall, these are OK. The fit and comfort is on point for what they are supposed to do. And they are priced quite competitively at £99 in the UK right now. Other regional prices are TBD, but we expect similar numbers for the EUR and USD pricing.

For £99 buds, they don’t sound too bad. Again, their sound is OK and it serves the use case. You can do a bit better, but if you spend a bit more dough. So, we’d say, the Huawei FreeArc are positioned well.