UPDATE: The Huawei Freebuds Pro is discounted to just $139 for a limited period. Check out the deal here.
A couple of weeks ago, Huawei released its latest wireless earbuds product, the Freebuds Pro. Initially, we didn’t pay much attention to it, but as the earbuds grew in popularity we decided to buy one from the Huawei store to see what new upgrades it had. 
Looking at the Freebuds Pro box, there’s nothing surprising in it. What we got is the charging case with the earbuds, the charging cable, the user manual, and two more sizes of tips for replacement. The earbuds we have here is a wireless charging version. In addition, Huawei also provides another option without wireless charging support, for a slightly lower price tag. So if you are indifferent about wireless charging, you can opt for the cheaper version which doesn’t have any other difference.
Huawei has updated the design of the Freebuds Pro. The earbuds look more like the Apple AirPods Pro. And each bud also has excellent weight control, which brings it very close to the wearing experience of the AirPods Pro. But I’m not really happy with the build quality since it has one notable absence — no official water resistance. There’s no IP rating listed for the buds. But we faced no issues using them in the rain or even during a sweaty exercise.
Even while wearing it for an entire day, I did not feel any discomfort unlike some other in-ear buds that I’ve used before. These earbuds fit really well on people with smaller ear canals while those who had slightly larger ears said that they found the Freebuds Pro a bit loose. This is quite opposite of the experience on the AirPods Pro which doesn’t fit well on smaller ears.
Let’s look at its charging case. The case has a bigger size than the AirPods Pro. Under noise cancelling mode,each fully-charged bud could continuously play music for over 4 hours and the charging case can support an additional 15-hours of usage. When you turn off the noise cancelling, each bud could be used for around 7 hours. But on calls, you get a shorter battery life of around 3.5hours. Well, the case’s charging is not really fast – whether it was wired or wireless charging, both took over an hour.
Now let’s take a look at how the noise cancelling works on the Freebuds Pro. To be honest, the noise cancelling was really impressive when we used it for the first time. The effect of noise reduction seems really similar to what we have on the AirPods Pro. We will talk about it in detail later. In addition, Huawei developed a dynamic noise cancellation technology to adapt to different use case scenarios, which can automatically detect surrounding noises and adjust the level of noise reduction. And if you’re using android devices, you can manually switch the noise-cancelling level in the Huawei AI Life app. This app has some other features that help the earbuds work better, but you only can have the app on Android devices.
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Now let’s look at the frequency response curve of Huawei FreeBuds Pro:
From the frequency response curve, we found a problem. It seems that there is leakage in the low frequency of the earbuds, which causes the low frequencies to decay a bit.
To be honest, this result was a little bit beyond my expectation. If you only look at around 125Hz, FreeBuds Pro’s noise reduction capability is still very strong, and its performance is pretty good. It can almost reach a level of about 40dB, which should be in line with the official maximum noise reduction value.
But the problem is that if the frequency continues to decrease, the noise reduction effect will be a bit reduced. Here, by the way, I want to talk directly about the actual wearing experience. Compared to the experience of wearing the Apple AirPods Pro, the in-ear design of the Freebuds Pro is a little loose for my ears, and there is always a feeling of instability. What I used were the default tips, but I think the instability is also caused by the shape of the earbuds.
However, we still found that the noise reduction effect of general low frequency to be slightly better than the AirPods Pro.
But the Freebuds Pro’s noise reduction performance at high frequency is a bit weaker than what it can do over low frequencies. Especially the noise-cancelling performance over the frequency bands around 1kHz and above, is not as strong as what we got from the AirPods Pro, but the difference is minimal.
So overall, we reached a consensus that the AirPods Pro still maintained the leading position, at least based on our hearing experience, but we believe that it no longer dominates this segment. And this is after considering that the experience and performance of noise cancelling is also affected by the devices that the earbuds are paired with.
If you used it for iOS devices, no doubt that the AirPods Pro is the best choice, but if you’re using Huawei devices or even other android devices, we would rather recommend the Freebuds Pro as our first choice. No doubt that Huawei now is doing a better job over software assistance. You can also have more adjustment in the app, and its not just limited to what we have on iOS for AirPods Pro – like tip fit test and ear detection, but also some useful features like Find my earphones and high-quality recording mode. By the way, another drawback here for AirPods Pro is the absence of google assistant support.
And then we tried its awareness mode, which is similar to the transparent mode on AirPods Pro. Most of the time, it worked well but sometimes it sounds a bit weird as it didn’t maintain a stable detection and simulation of surrounding sounds. And in the awareness mode, we can also turn on the feature of enhanced voices. It did improve sound delivery of human voices, but at the same time other high frequencies also got enhanced remarkably, which turned out to be a different kind of noisy enhancement.
Although we did love the excellent noise canceling, we still have to say that the Freebuds Pro’s pressure balance for ears is not as good as the experience on the AirPods Pro. The AirPods Pro used to have the same problem at the beginning, but eventually, they compromised between noise canceling effect and the balance of ear pressure with a software update. And yesterday we also got a software update for the Freebuds Pro and things got better but the pressure balance was still not perfect.
Now let’s move on to the most important part — sound quality. After several product upgrades, we can finally say that Huawei has done an excellent job in tuning the new earbuds. In our experience, it’s the best sound quality that we’ve had on TWS earbuds. Compared to the AirPods pro, the Freebuds Pro emphasizes the low end a bit more, but such emphasis doesn’t go too far or too heavy. And it doesn’t mean that the high ends get downplayed, we still could clearly hear dynamic high-frequency instruments and vocals. And the call-quality is also not bad, especially when we turn on the high-quality recording option. It can handle most scenarios well.
The multi-device support is another major feature of the FreeBuds Pro. No doubt it’s a great idea, having the buds connect to two devices at the same time, regardless of the devices’ brand or system. However, things can be a bit confusing at times. Manually connecting to different devices beyond android devices sometimes didn’t work well. For example, I found it’s difficult to connect a Windows PC as a second device after getting successfully paired.
The Freebuds Pro also has a great Bluetooth connection. Especially on Huawei devices, it turned out to be a delightful and simple experience. The connection is stable with no delays. As we play games and videos on Android devices, the audio latency is really hard to perceive.
With a cheaper price than the AirPods Pro, we believe that the Freebuds Pro is a better choice for Android users. And if you were a Huawei user, it can be the perfect companion for your phone. Regardless of the devices you use, it’s still the most impressive alternative to the AirPods Pro.
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