Huawei has just launched a new service in China that is aimed to offer users a way to replace their lost TWS earbuds. The company will now let you buy a single true wireless earphone at a discounted price.

The latest service from the Chinese tech giant is quite an innovative initiative from the company that should be more common in the currently booming TWS hearables market. Huawei will now let those that lost an earbud purchase the a single bud for a 50 percent discount. This new ‘worry/hassle free’ service will be available for products within a 2 year period of their purchase.

As of right now, the company has included three TWS earbuds as part of this new service. This includes the FreeBuds 4i, FreeBuds 4, and FreeBuds Pro. So for those that lost a bud from any of these models can purchase the single FreeBuds 4i bud for 39 Yuan (roughly 11 US Dollars), FreeBuds 4 for 69 Yuan (roughly 6 US Dollars), and the FreeBuds Pro for a reasonable 79 Yuan (roughly 12 US Dollars). To avail this offer, users will have to bring the charging case and the earbuds to a Huawei service store in China.

Unfortunately, the company has only launched this offer/service in its home country alone at the moment. Although, we’d wish for more companies to adopt this offer in markets across the globe. Currently, the Indian market for TWS earbuds is booming, so this would be a great offering in the region as well. But, we will have to wait and see if other brands follow suit.

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In the past few weeks, we’ve introduced you all to the Huawei Freebuds Pro (review here) and the Xiaomi Air 2 Pro (review here). They are the latest wireless earbuds with active noise cancelation from two of the top smartphone brands in the world. Today, we’ll pit the popular ANC earbuds in the market against each other including big names like the Huawei Freebuds Pro vs Airpods Pro vs Xiaomi Air 2 Pro.

But recently, we received quite a lot of messages from our viewers asking which one among them was the best choice. So we realized it was necessary to make a special video comparing these popular ANC earbuds to help you to find the best one suitable for you.

To make things interesting, we will introduce you to a new earbuds option in this comparison, which was released just recently — the OPPO ENCO X. The OPPO earbuds is quite popular in China at the moment and is also priced similar to the other earbuds in the comparison. And to add a reference point, we will also bring the good old AirPods Pro. So we have shortlisted four earbuds – Huawei Freebuds Pro, Xiaomi Air 2 Pro, OPPO ENCO X, and finally the AirPods Pro. We’ll go through these four wireless earbuds and do a quick comparison of their strengths and drawbacks. I hope you’ll finally be able to make a decision on the best-suited earbuds for you after seeing this video. 

Given that we haven’t reviewed the OPPO ENCO X on Gizmochina before, let me introduce you to the earbuds first. Instead of the active noise cancellation, the biggest selling point of the OPPO Enco X is the audio quality. OPPO has claimed that the sound tuning work was done in cooperation with Dynaudio. So we are actually pretty excited to check out its sound performance. And it also supports Bluetooth 5.2 connection, which also allows it to connect to two devices at the same time. 

Xiaomi Air 2 Pro vs Huawei Freebuds Pro vs OPPO Enco X vs Airpods Pro: Design

Well, let’s check out their designs first. To be honest, personally, I will pick the Xiaomi Air 2 Pro because of its unique design. The designs of the Enco X and the Freebuds Pro are influenced by the AirPods Pro to some extent. But don’t get me wrong. It doesn’t mean that the design of the other three earbuds isn’t good enough. On the contrary, we have to admit that so far, the AirPods Pro has designed one of the best TWS earbuds shape for active noise cancellation and great wearing comfort. Although the Xiaomi Air 2 Pro’s design distinguishes itself from the others, the bigger size of the earbuds and the case is really not good for convenience. The size limits the items you can keep in your pocket. We found you could only fit one phone in your pocket at max since the case took up additional space. 

And talking about the wearing comfort, there’s no doubt that the AirPods Pro has a great fit for different shapes of ears. And the wearing experience of the Freebuds Pro and the Enco X was pretty close to what we have with the AirPods Pro. Notably, Xiaomi’s Air 2 Pro has no advantage in this department. You may experience some discomfort when listening to the Air 2 Pro for a long time. 

So if you want the best wearing comfort, the AirPods Pro would be the best choice. But if you don’t want to spend a lot, the Freebuds Pro and Enco X should also be good enough for you in terms of wearing comfort. 

Xiaomi Air 2 Pro vs Huawei Freebuds Pro vs OPPO Enco X vs Airpods Pro: Performance

Talking about their noise cancelation performance, we have to admit that the AirPods Pro still is the best Active Noise-canceling wireless earbuds in the market, especially because of its excellent low-frequency noise control. And surprisingly, Enco X also did well at controlling low frequency noise, though it was not as impressive as what we had on the AirPods Pro. However, compared to the Huawei Freebuds Pro, OPPO’s high-frequency noise canceling work loses the advantage. As for the Air 2 Pro, as mentioned in our review last week, it’s no match for the others in terms of ANC. This isn’t really surprising given its price. 

Editor’s Pick: Xiaomi Air 2 Pro ANC Review: Excellent Battery Life but Average Noise Cancelation

For sound quality, we have to acknowledge that this is going to be very subjective. While we’ve done quite a lot of research, our subjective listening still may have a bias in a comparison featuring earbuds from 4 different brands. 

First, let’s see what kind of Bluetooth codec support they have. The AirPods Pro and the Freebuds pro support SBC and AAC codec, while the Enco X and the Air 2 Pro support SBC and LHDC codec. Theoretically, the LHDC codec is a better codec to deliver higher sound quality for wireless earphones. But we found that the Freebuds Pro is the one that gave us the most exceptional listening experience. Although OPPO’s Enco X is claimed to be tuned by Dynaudio and Xiaomi has emphasized that they are going to release a firmware update for better sound quality on the Air 2 Pro, right now their audio quality is still not as good as the Freebuds Pro. But to be honest, the gap between the Enco X and the Freebuds Pro is not so obvious: the Enco X is a bit too prominent at high frequencies, which may not be preferred by some users, while the Freebuds Pro is pretty balanced in presenting a wide range of frequencies. So does the AirPods Pro. Its sound quality is pretty balanced. As for the Air 2 Pro, so far we can only put it at the bottom of this list. Honestly, we don’t understand why this product was released without complete software optimization, so the earbuds don’t match up to our expectations. 

And now let’s move to the other special features. Except for the Air 2 Pro, all the other three earbuds support the ear tip fit test. Only the Enco X supports customized shortcut mode on the connected phone and both, the Freebuds Pro and the Enco X support volume control on the buds. However, only the Freebuds Pro comes with a smart mode for the ANC, enabling different levels of noise-canceling effect. Enco X also features two levels of noise canceling. While for the AirPods Pro and the Air 2 Pro, there are only On and Off options for ANC. 

But NOTE that unlike the other three earbuds, the Air 2 Pro’s menu only supports the Chinese language. There is no other available language. Even for voice alerts, it’s all in Chinese!

Xiaomi Air 2 Pro vs Huawei Freebuds Pro vs OPPO Enco X vs Airpods Pro: Connectivity

All of them support Bluetooth 5.0 connection or above. Specifically, the Freebuds Pro and Enco X support Bluetooth 5.2 and this allows them to connect to two devices at the same time, regardless of operating systems or brands. 

But compared to the other three earbuds, the connection of the AirPods Pro is the most stable. Especially when connected to Apple devices, the stable signal and low latency perform well during gaming and video play, while for Android devices, the best option among these four is the Freebuds Pro. It could also deliver pretty low-latency and decent sound. No matter for gaming or video play, the sound delay was almost imperceptible. 

On the other hand, although both the Air 2 Pro and the Enco X claimed that they have optimized latency performance for gaming, they both encountered some issues when we tried to access their low-latency mode. For the Air 2 Pro, the latest firmware didn’t include the low-latency mode and all we can do right now is wait for updates. And for the Enco X, the sound delay was more obvious when we applied the LHDC codec. When we changed the Bluetooth codec to the SBC with lower sound quality, then the latency problem finally got fixed，which also enabled lag-free gaming. But it’s still no match to the performance of the Freebuds pro.

Xiaomi Air 2 Pro vs Huawei Freebuds Pro vs OPPO Enco X vs Airpods Pro: Battery Life

As for their battery life, the Air 2 Pro’s battery life was very surprising and exceeded our expectations. The other three were all able to last for around 5 hours under noise-canceling mode in a single charge, but the Air 2 Pro amazingly had 50% power left after 5-hours of usage, which is extremely impressive. 

So that’s what we have on these four popular noise-canceling wireless earbuds in the market right now. No doubt the AirPods Pro is still the best choice for Apple devices, while for Android or other platforms, we’d like to recommend the Freebuds Pro as our first choice. We think that Enco X is another good option thanks to its lower price. However, you really need to be careful with the Air 2 Pro. Although it has the most affordable price, the earbuds feels like a semi-finished product without good software optimization. And it only supports Chinese language. 

So that’s it for today. If you have anything to share about these earbuds, we look forward to hearing from you in the comments down below. And don’t forget to subscribe to our Youtube channel. We spend a lot of time on these comparisons and your likes and feedback will keep us motivated to do more of these in the coming days. 

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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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Huawei is set to host its developers conference on 10th September 2020. In the event, the company is expected to launch various products with the company’s consumer business CEO, Yu Chengdong, hinting at the features of its upcoming flagship audio product.

According to the senior official, the upcoming hearables will be announced during HDC 2020. The new flagship audio product has apparently impressed Yu Chengdong thanks to its dynamic noise reduction performance. The executive stated that the earphone is capable of recognizing adjusting its noise reduction feature according to the environment around users. As stated by Yu himself, the earbuds adjusted to his being at work in the office, at work, and even when he was outdoors or in a plane.

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The hearable Yu Chengdong used is official and it is the Huawei Freebuds Pro TWS earbuds. It is reported that the Pro variant of the company’s Freebud brings various improvements across the board. Furthermore, the new earphones are said to feature a comfortable fit, improved aesthetic, and better battery life as well. Although, the intelligent noise reduction feature will undoubtedly be its highlighting and selling feature.

The Freebuds Pro will reportedly feature the company’s Kirin A1 chip, support Bluetooth 5.2, and will have three built in microphones. It arrives with a new ear design and is expected to launch in black, silver, and white. Unfortunately, finer details like pricing are currently unknown, although, we can expect the pricing can be expected to be over 1000 Yuan (roughly 146 US Dollars).

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Huawei is scheduled to announce yet another pair of wireless earbuds this week. The product will arrive as the FreeBuds Pro, and while we already know what the earbuds will look like thanks to leaked renders, live photos have now also been posted on the web.

The images were posted on Twitter by the account DuanRui (@duanrui1205) and they show the earbuds in two colors – gray/black and white. The earbuds have quite unusual stems which are like rectangular blocks and also pretty thick. There are silver bands at the bottom and the manufacturer’s name is printed on the stem.

HUAWEI FreeBuds Pro pic.twitter.com/j1dj6kCUY5

— DuanRui (@duanrui1205) September 7, 2020

The FreeBuds Pro will have noise cancellation but are shown to also feature silicone tips to keep the sound in. There are large black circles on each earbud which we believe are IR sensors for wear detection. Personally, I wish they were much smaller as they really do stick out in a not-so-appealing way on the white variant.

The earbuds will come in a pebble-like case with a flat base and a flat top. The case should be able to stand on a flat surface unlike that of the FreeBuds 3 which has a rounded base.

The Huawei FreeBuds Pro will have the Kirin A1 chip, Bluetooth 5.2, three microphones on each earbud, and active noise cancelation. It has been reported to have a price tag of €150 and is expected to go on sale in early October.

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A few days ago, Huawei confirmed that the company will be hosting a launch event on 10th September in China where it will launch a few of its products. At the same event, the company is set to debut its FreeBuds Pro TWS earphones.

Today, Huawei has released a new teaser video for the upcoming FreeBuds Pro headset. It reveals that the product features dynamic noise reduction technology. The teaser also indicates that the TWS earphones look similar to the letter “P.”

The company has already launched a few models in the series and now it seems that Huawei has ditched the number-based naming for the “Pro” suffix. Some of the details related to the true wireless earphones have been leaked online.

It is said that the upcoming TWS earphones from Huawei are similar in design to Apple AirPods Pro with silicone tips. It will be powered by the company’s in-house HiSilicon Kirin A1 chipset, which powers most of Huawei’s wearable devices.

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They are expected to feature Bluetooth 5.2 connectivity and ANC (Active Noise Cancellation). While the size of drivers remains unknown, it is said that each bud will feature a total of three microphones and a 52.5mAh battery.

As for the pricing, the Huawei FreeBuds Pro will start at €150 in Europe and will be available for purchase from early October. However, it seems like the product will first go on sale in the company’s home market China.

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