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Headphones that stay in place

Review: Huawei Freearc - Affordable earbuds for sports

Freearc is water-resistant, allowing you to hear both the music and your surroundings. Additionally, they stay securely in place even during more intense workouts.

Erik Mörner
Published

When I exercise, I always listen to music, and I have twice experienced earbuds falling out of my ear with particularly serious consequences. Once, a few years ago, an earbud fell out of my ear during training and landed right in a vole's nest beside the path where I was running. I never retrieved that earbud. The next time was just a few weeks ago. I was out running in a thin layer of fresh snow when one of my earbuds, as I was adjusting the volume, fell out of my ear and onto the street. White earbud in white fresh snow turned out to be super difficult to find. Especially since I didn't know more precisely than within a dozen metres where I had dropped it. Finally, after more than 15 minutes of meticulous searching, I found it. 

Easy to fiddle with

As long as I don't fiddle with the earbud, I find that almost all earbuds sit securely even when I'm out running. However, just when you're about to answer a call, change a song, or adjust the volume, there's always a risk that the earbud will fall out. But not with the type of earbud that Huawei Freearc belongs to. Huawei Freearc is a pair of new earbuds that are open in design and therefore do not block out surrounding sounds in any way, quite the opposite. They are made so that you can hear traffic and other important sounds around you while enjoying music, podcasts, or having a conversation during a phone call. Here, I have no problem changing songs or adjusting the volume during a jog. I swipe over the earbud up or down to adjust the volume and pause or change the song with two or three quick taps. It works well even when I'm running at full speed. 

The gestures for control can also be changed in the accompanying app, Huawei AI Life. This app is available for both Android and iPhone and makes it easy to connect the headphones, update software, and manage settings. I can easily have multiple devices connected at the same time, and when I connect both an iPhone and several Androids, it's easy to choose which one to use with the headphones at the moment. 

Good sound

Since the headphones are open, you don't have active noise cancellation, but there is noise reduction for calls, so you can make calls and be heard well even in noisy environments with a lot of background noise. I try this and gradually increase the background noise with the effect that the person I'm talking to still hears me well, but doesn't hear any of the noise. However, the closer I get to the source of the noise, the more processed my voice sounds, so there is a downside. As long as I keep my distance from the loudest noise, I'm heard perfectly. The music sound when I listen in the headphones is good, though not high-resolution, but with a nice balance without really standing out particularly. However, I notice that they don't always disconnect or pause the music when I take them out of my ears, so by mistake, they sometimes continue playing when I've placed the headphones on a table or even occasionally ten seconds after I've put them in the case. But then, the headphones are also relatively cheap with a price tag just over a thousand kronor. 

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