Disclosure: I’d like to thank EarFun for sending me the EarFun Clip for this review. All thoughts and opinions are my own, and EarFun had no say or input on the contents of this review.

The open-ear earbud category is starting to get more traction lately as many people seek alternatives to in-ear Bluetooth earbuds. Some people like to hear their surrounding environment while still being able to enjoy music or audio, and this is an area where open-ear earbuds excel. So, when EarFun reached out to me about their new EarFun Clip, I was intrigued, mostly because I myself had written off this category as “interesting, but not for me”. Bluetooth in-ear earbuds already have transparency modes, so why would I need this? This comes from my experience with the BASN AirS1, an on-ear Bluetooth headphone that, while it provides good value, never really convinced me that this type of product was practical. So, does the EarFun Clip, at $69.99 USD, change my mind about this product category? Read on to find out.

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• EarFun Clip earbuds with charging case
• USB-C to USB-A cable
• Manual and documentation

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The EarFun Clip is open-ear earbuds, meaning they don’t get inserted into your ear canal like the EarFun Air Pro 4 does, but instead sit on the ear, much like Apple’s AirPods 4. The difference here, though, is there’s a clip that wraps around your ear to keep them stable. This is achieved with one part of the earbud sitting on your ear, just outside your ear canal, and the second part wrapping around to the other side and lightly hugging your ear. I say hugging and not pinching as it’s very subtle, but firm enough to be stable.

If you have large ears, the pressure of the hugging may be stronger for you, and lead to some discomfort, but I, with my slightly smaller ears, experienced no discomfort at all. The earbuds themselves are light, at just 5.7 grams, and many times it didn’t feel like I was wearing them at all. Yet at the same time, they are extremely stable and stay in place. This is true even for activities such as workouts, running, and walking

The EarFun Clip is predominantly plastic, with a rubberized bridge that connects the two pieces of the earbud together. This rubber bridge has a good amount of bending but also remains rigid enough to stay in place. When placed on the ear, you can adjust where the back part of the earbud sits by moving it up and down your ear. If you have glasses, like me, you’ll most likely have it sit just above your ear lobe, not to interfere with the arms of your glasses. You’ll also notice the driver is slightly angled, so you will want them to sit closer to the bottom of your ear so the sound is more directly going towards your ear canal.

The earbuds themselves feel very high quality, much more than the $69 price tag would indicate. There are no touch controls, but there is a single physical button on each earbud on the top part that goes behind the ear. This makes it very convenient to access and hard to accidentally press or activate (one of the reasons I love physical buttons). When you press it, there’s a nice tactile feedback so you know you actually activated it. On the inside of each earbud, L and R are clearly marked. As well, the right earbud has a red ring around the connector to the speaker driver, and the left earbud has a silver ring, making it very easy to identify which earbud goes on which ear. The Clip is also rated for IP55 protection, meaning it is safe from dust, sweat, and water splashes.

The charging case is very light and is decently sized. By that, I mean it’s generally small enough to keep in a pocket without bulging out too much, and the lightweight helps make it very portable. It’s made of plastic, and the outside of it does feel kind of cheap, but once opened it has a nice glossy plastic shell that looks a bit more premium. The front of the charging case has an LED light to indicate pairing and charging status. The bottom of the case has a USB-C connector for charging and a button to manually activate pairing mode.

The earbuds sit securely inside the case thanks to strong magnets, and it’s actually very satisfying to take them out and put in. The earbuds fit in the case in only one way, which ensures you can’t mix up which earbud goes in which side. The lid of the charging case also opens and closes strongly, which assures that it won’t accidentally open if mishandled or dropped.

The actual user experience of the EarFun Clip is straightforward and easy. Once you open the lid, it will go into pairing mode. If you have an Android phone, the Clip utilizes Google Fast Pair, which makes it very easy to both connect to an Android device and switch between them. On an iPhone/iPad, you simply have to open the lid to enter pairing mode, and then select it from the list in the Bluetooth settings.

The Clip supports dual device connection. You can have them paired to multiple devices, and connected to two devices at the same time. If you enable LDAC, this disables the dual device connection feature.

The earbuds don’t have any in-ear detection (naturally, since they aren’t in-ear earbuds), so you will need to rely on the physical button to control playback. Thankfully, the button is conveniently located and provides good tactile feedback when pressed. By default, pressing the button twice on either earbud will pause or play audio. For volume control, pressing once on the left earbud lowers the volume, and pressing once on the right earbud increases it. To go back to the previous track, triple-press the left earbud, and on the right earbud, triple-press the button to go to the next track. You can also do a long press on each earbud (about 1.5 seconds). By default, this is set to trigger the voice assistance, but, like all of the other button combinations, you can customize what they do in the EarFun Audio app. I left everything at default, except on the left earbud, I set it to trigger Surge Bass (more on that in the Audio Modes section), and the right earbud’s long press triggers Game Mode.

Being open-ear earbuds, the main advantage is that you can hear your surrounding environment. Yes, in-ear Bluetooth earbuds achieve the same thing through their use of microphones and Transparency mode, but you get a lot of wind and background white noise that can be distracting. So, how do the EarFun Clips perform then? Very, very well. You can clearly hear your audio while still clearly hearing your environment, allowing you to maintain awareness of your surroundings. It’s actually refreshing, and there’s no need to mess with ANC and Transparency modes and settings, you just put the earbuds on and listen.

One thing I did not expect, though, is that there is almost no sound leakage from these earbuds. Even if you have the volume up pretty loud (and these earbuds can get loud), when they are in your there’s almost no sound leakage. Unless you are standing right beside someone wearing these, you won’t hear sound coming from them. It’s shocking, but in a very good way.

EarFun has included a few audio modes with the Clip to be used in certain situations. They are:

• Game Mode
• Theatre Mode
• Surge Bass
• Privacy Mode

Game Mode reduces the latency to below 50ms and is intended to be used for watching videos and for gaming. I would say it succeeds and does exactly what is advertised. I wouldn’t use it for competitive gaming, but for single-player games, it performed just fine. I also used the Clip while watching some YouTube videos, podcasts, and movies. If you’re really looking or picky, you can notice a very slight delay, but I think it actually does a really good job here and is very serviceable. Game Mode can be used when using LDAC, and it performs very well.

Theatre Mode “expands the soundstage, creating an immersive surround effect and revealing more sound details”. When enabled, it disables the Equalizer, and it cannot be used when using LDAC. As far as how it sounds, it does expand the soundstage quite a bit, giving you a very “outside your head” feeling. It does not give you more sound detail, but it doesn’t take away from it either. Great for movies, but not much else in my opinion. This will be a personal listening preference.

Surge Bass is a “deep and powerful bass mode that makes the bass fuller and more impactful, delivering a wave-like sound experience”. That sounds amazing, but it doesn’t really do what it describes. This is essentially a mid-bass boost, and I do like the effect, to the point where I leave this setting on most of the time when listening to music. This setting is needed as there isn’t a lot of bass impact from the EarFun Clip, which makes sense since they don’t seal in your ear.

Privacy Mode “Quickly lowers headphone volume, reduces sound leakage, and helps you better perceive your surroundings”. What this translates to is it’s a very quick way to lower the volume so you can interact with someone or listen to an announcement. It’s not a feature that I found to be that useful, but it might be for someone. What is nice is that you can configure the controls to activate it, instead of just relying on the app.

The EarFun Clip supports Bluetooth 6.0. This version of Bluetooth has some practical benefits over Bluetooth 5.4, but I’m not sure any of them are fully realized on the Clip. Possibly the increased distance, but otherwise, this is just a future-proofing mechanism and doesn’t take anything away from the Clip’s Bluetooth performance or functionality.

The Clip supports SBC, AAC, and LDAC. Personally, I think LDAC is a bit overkill for a product like this, but the option to use it is nice. I managed to pair it with my Samsung Galaxy Fold 5, HiBy R3Pro II, and FiiO JM21 using the Optimized for Audio (990kbps) mode. It performed perfectly, and I had no stutters or dropouts. AAC also works very well, and is also how you will be using it when using an Apple device. I had no issues with my iPhone 16 and iPad Pro.

Overall, the Bluetooth performance has been excellent and stable, and it’s actually refreshing to say that I encountered no issues here.

The battery performance is a big highlight for me. EarFun states the Clip will get “Up to 10 hours, Totally 40 hours with the charging case” when LDAC is off, and “Up to 5.5 hours, Totally 22 hours with the charging case” when LDAC is on.

My testing and overall experience line up with this. With LDAC off, I was getting virtually the same numbers that EarFun stated. With LDAC on, I was getting closer to 5 hours of usage. Given the battery is just 60mAh in size for the earbuds, it’s not surprising, and 5 hours of listening time with LDAC is more than enough in my use cases.

Charging the earbuds from empty takes just over an hour, with the charging case taking about 2 hours for a full charge.

The EarFun Audio app is relatively unchanged from when I did my Tune Pro review, although they did take one of my biggest criticisms and cleaned up the Equalizer section a bit. It’s now a little cleaner with many of the redundant options gone. I really like the EarFun app. It’s quick, fluid, and all of the settings are in one place.

Here are some screenshots of what it looks like with the EarFun Clip:

The EarFun Clip utilizes a 10.8mm carbon fiber composite dynamic driver. Being that it sits on your ear with the speaker directed at your ear canal, you would be forgiven for thinking that sound quality will suffer. Well, it depends on your expectations. I honestly had low expectations going into this review, but I was pleasantly surprised when I paired them with my phone and started listening to my usual testing playlist (linked above).

First off, even with Surge Bass enabled, there is a lack of bass presence and impact. The Surge Bass mode helps elevate the mid-bass a mid to bring back some of that energy, but these earbuds are not for those who need hard-hitting, impactful bass. Physics prevents it from being that way. Otherwise, the midrange is very clean and vocals are slightly forward (this helps with listening to podcasts and audiobooks, anything dialogue-focused focused really), and the treble is slightly open but not sparkly or airy. It still retains detail but is not sibilant or harsh at all. I think the treble is sacrificed the most in all of this, but for a $69 pair of open-earbuds, it’s hard to complain.

I wouldn’t use these earbuds for any critical or analytical listening, the detail and dynamic range just isn’t there. If your goal, though, is to have some background music playing while you are focused on an activity, then the Clip greatly succeeds at this. They sound good with all music genres, maybe slightly favoring rock and jazz. You also have access to an Equalizer within the EarFun Audio app to tweak things if you need.

The EarFun Clip has two microphones on each earbud. When using the Clip for calls, I was able to clearly hear the other person, and they told me that my voice was fairly clear and loud. I did some additional testing during a windy and rainy day here and found the microphones to be quite good, even when a little bit of wind and background noise is introduced. Where things fall apart is when there is a lot of street traffic or construction noise. The person on the other end was not able to hear my voice over all this additional noise, so it would seem the microphones had a hard time isolating my voice. A little underwhelming, to be honest. Hopefully, some fixes can be done here through firmware updates.

The EarFun Clip satisfies a growing niche that a number of people are becoming interested in. Open-ear earbuds aren’t a new thing, but they have come a long way, and they give us a viable alternative to the AirPods Pro style that is saturating the TWS earbud market right now. The Clip doesn’t need ANC or Transparency modes as the real intention is to always be able to be aware of your surroundings, yet still be able to enjoy your music. It truly succeeds at this.

I don’t have many complaints, really, especially considering the price of $69. The charging case could feel a bit more premium, and maybe be a bit smaller to make it even more pocketable. The bass performance could also be more impactful, though with the design, I’m not sure how to accomplish that. And lastly, the microphone quality could be better in louder environments.

Otherwise, these earbuds do exactly what they’re supposed to do, and on top of that, they are very easy to use. If you’re in the market for this type of earbud, I highly recommend you check out the EarFun Clip.

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