Wireless earbuds are a very popular tech purchase in 2025 and one particular type that is becoming more common is the open ear design. Rather than create a seal in your ear canal with a rubber tip or even use the cradle of your ear to rest the bud in, this third option uses hooks to hang on your ear and blast sound into them, sitting on the outside of your canal.

This lets ambient sound in so you feel less claustrophobic but also allows you to hear your surroundings, making open earbuds a great choice for runners and exercising outdoors when you don’t want to be closed off from the world. They’re also ideal for phone and video calls for those of us who are deskbound, and can be worn for hours on end as the design doesn’t put pressure on your ears.

The latest pair of open buds I’ve been testing is the Huawei FreeArc, a good-sounding £99 pair of hooks that have sat happily on my ears for days, piping in tunes, podcasts and calls with ease. They’re not the cheapest open buds out there, but are comparable in fit, performance and price to the £94 Shokz OpenFit Air and make a solid choice if you want a lightweight pair of all day headphones.

The FreeArc comes in black, white or a snazzy green. I tested the former, a subtle dark colour that recalls the look of single-ear Bluetooth headsets from the early 2000s. The hook has a rubberised texture and is very comfortable, designed to gently bend to any ear shape. I had no issue with fit, and the two buds stayed in place when running. You’ll need to fiddle a little to get the speakers firing into your ear at the right angle, and Huawei says the material will gradually mould over time to stay in the correct position.

A matt covering with the Huawei logo adorns each outer of the unit, which is touch sensitive on both buds to allow for tap and swipe controls to pause, play, skip track and adjust volume. These all work well, even when jogging, and I didn’t encounter any false touches from my hair, glasses or hats.

Music sounds clear when streaming from Spotify and other sources wirelessly. I tested the FreeArc with an iPhone 16 and Samsung Galaxy S25, and in a quiet room, volume is more than enough even at 50 percent. Reproduction is relatively flat but not in a bad way, there just isn’t much separation of different frequencies. This is to be expected, as the open design means a degree of sound leakage so people around you will hear the soft jangle of your tunes in said quiet room. The Bose Ultra Open Earbuds sound a lot better and, unlike the Huawei, have Hi-Res music compatibility, but they also cost three times as much at £299. For £99, the FreeArc are more than good enough.

Huawei offers its AI Life app for Android that lets you change the tap and swipe functions to your liking as well as adjust the EQ to a few presets or make your own. You can get this from the Huawei App Gallery app store on Huawei phones or sideload it using a link from Huawei on any other Android phone. It’s odd that the app is not in the Google Play Store, but not unusual for Huawei devices these days.

The app is available for iPhone in the Apple App Store but lacks any of the adjustable features, and is merely there to let you update the FreeArc’s software if and when a software update becomes available.

It means the FreeArc are a plug and play earbud choice with little customisation on offer, but for their function and price this is no bad thing. Huawei touts noise cancellation features, but these are not designed, as with many earbuds with active noise cancellation, to fully block out external sounds. This is close to impossible on open buds. Instead, the tech works to try and minimise noises such as traffic and wind so you can still hear the audio when you;re somewhere noisier.

As with other open buds, this isn’t greatly affected. Wearing the FreeArc on the London Underground, I was unable to hear the speaker in a podcast when it got very loud, meaning I had to pause the audio and wait till I was somewhere quieter. But pumping music on a run, I was happy with the performance, and though the noise cancellation isn’t a marvel, it did well in a pinch to tone down some wind noise to keep my tunes in check.

Battery life is solid at about seven hours of non-stop playback from a single charge, and a fully charged case will get you 28 hours overall, so the FreeArc ended up serving me well throughout a week of constant use before I needed to plug everything in to charge back up. The case is a bit too large for my liking, but that’s not unusual when you have to fit buds with a full ear hook inside. It charges via USB-C, with no cable included in the box. You also get IP57 water and dust resistance.

You are able to connect the FreeArc to devices simultaneously, for example to your phone and laptop, allowing you to switch between each easily to take calls and stream audio on either device. This is a common feature on earbuds these days, and it’s good to see Huawei offering it. You just have to pause the audio on one device before starting it on the other for the switch to work without a hitch.

Less impressive is the voice call audio quality. On phone and WhatsApp voice calls compared to directly from my phone or other earbuds, callers sounded more robotic and less clear, and those people also told me the line sounded bad. That’s a real shame and something to bear in mind if you want open buds you can take lots of calls using.

If you want wireless earbuds with noise cancellation and top drawer audio you should look elsewhere, but the Huawei FreeArc don’t pretend to offer either of these. Instead, they are a loud, solid-sounding, comfortable pair of open earbuds best suited for Android users for a competitive price a shade under £100.