Honor Earbuds Open Review: Some AI And Very Subtle Sound Outside Your Ear

I have a soft spot for true wireless earbuds. I've tested some of the best you can buy, and I always keep coming back. So, when Honor had a set of open earbuds to try, I was immediately interested. Open earbuds tend to be more comfortable that their in-ear counterparts, because they're not designed to go in your ears. But they come with a pretty big downside — external noise.

The Honor Earbuds Open come by their name honestly. They're hook-style earbuds that loop over your lobe and hover a speaker right next to your ear canal. This turns out to be both a good and a bad thing — but both of those conditions are unique to your individual ear shape. For some it won't be a problem at all.

Honor is also leaning heavily into AI to make these earbuds really shine, and that's a bit of an Achilles' heel. It's important to get the basics right, before you try to embellish, and it seems like Honor skipped past some of them. I've been using a review sample of Honor Earbuds Open provided by Honor for about one week, and this is my full review.

One of the more notable features about the Honor Earbuds Open is how slim they are and how slim the case is. Normal earbuds have squat, vaguely cube-shaped earbud cases that really don't fit well into a pocket. You can slide them into a bag or a purse, but not so much in a pocket. The Earbuds Open buck that trend with a slim case that is just a hair under 21 millimeters thick. It's more like a business card holder than an earbuds case, and I'm here for it.

The buds themselves are also quite svelte. They have a pretty standard design with the speaker itself attached to a silicon loop ending in a thicker battery. The speaker which hovers over your ear canal has an outward-facing silver colored cover that is touch sensitive.

As is typical with buds like this, the earbuds snap into the case magnetically. The connection is quite secure which is reassuring. Speaking of charging, according to Honor the Earbuds are good for 6 hours of music playing and 22 hours with the case. That seems consistent with my testing.

As mentioned, the outside of the earbuds is touch sensitive, and that's how you control your playback. Due to the design of the buds, and the shape of my ears, using the touch controls is a bit awkward. Since the speaker is basically hanging in the air next to my ear canal, I need to push the bud into my ear in order to trigger the control.

What's nice is that you can control playback, track skipping forward and back, and adjust volume all with the touch controls. Taps control playback and track skipping while you can swipe up and down to adjust the volume. The touch controls are very intuitive but the way the buds sit in my ears make the controls odd. Again, your mileage may vary based on the shape of your ears.

As for wearability, Honor boasts "all-day comfort," and I believe that. I wore the earbuds for a few extended work sessions, and I barely noticed they were there.

If comfort is important, sound quality is even more important, and these earbuds sounds quite good. The 16-millimeter drivers produce great sound that covers the spectrum. I typically start off my audio testing with dubstep music to hear not only how well the buds can reproduce dep bass, but also to make sure that the rest of the sound spectrum doesn't get drowned out. That's certainly the case here. After moving over into metal, there's enough nuance in these buds to hear music that is more technically complicated.

The earbuds even come with some amount of active noise cancellation, which is making its presence known in high-quality open earbuds like those from Samsung and Apple. The Airpods 4 ANC are still the best open earbuds you can find, when it comes to ANC, but Honor manages to make its noise-reduction noticeable. It's not amazing, but it can do enough to reduce persistent noises around you, as I discovered during two work sessions at a local library. It's welcome, but not mind blowing. Still, some ANC is better than none, especially when it comes to open earbuds, so I'm a fan.

There are a few parts of the software I need to address, but before I do, it's important to note that the software I was testing is in beta. Actually, the software isn't even available in the U.S. — more on that later. So, it's important to keep two things in mind when I'm drawing these conclusions. First, the software isn't final. Second, even if it was, it's software; it can change. I tested the software with a TestFlight build on my iPhone 16 Pro Max.

But the software is where these earbuds start to fall apart a little bit, and there are two areas that are particularly lacking. The first comes in earbud configuration. Put simply, typical sets on earbuds allow you to set an equalizer and configure the controls on the buds. When it comes to the equalizer, there are no options except "original" and "workout amplifier". I don't know what either of those options mean. It's not terribly helpful.

As for configuring touch controls, there is some degree of that, but not a lot. Each kind of tap — single tap, double tap, triple tap, tap and hold, etc — has at most 5 controls you can choose from. It's that kind of artificial limitation that can be maddening on a set of earbuds. Sure, the default controls are intuitive, but if you want to raise the volume by triple tapping on the right earbud, darn it, you should be able to.

It should be mentioned that the app you use to configure the earbuds is called the "AI Space" but there's really very little AI about it. The core AI functionality comes as an AI translator. I tested the translator by playing back a movie in a foreign language, and it worked, but it only worked one sentence at a time, and it was very laggy besides. By the time the translator started translating, someone else was talking.

This isn't really all that much better than just using Google translate — I know because last year in Paris, I had a long, in-depth conversation with an Uber driver. To my surprise Google translate worked remarkably well, and faster than these earbuds. I don't want to harp too much, except that the app is called AI Space, and the artificial intelligence it includes is...fine, but not amazing.

That's reflected in the apps design language as well. The app feels like an afterthought. There are radio buttons and text buttons that make the app look like a webpage from the early 2000s. It's these little details that take the overall quality of the earbuds and diminish them. They're not bad — the app is not bad — but it takes away from the overall package, which is disappointing.

Overall, these earbuds are very solid — the good very much outweighs the bad. I enjoy using them, and the design, while simple, appeals to me. I like slipping these into a pocket. The sound quality is quite good, and they're very comfortable to wear over the long term.

But I wish the app and the software in general were better. The AI Space is just fine, but it also feels like AI was bolted on just so it could be called "AI Space" and not "Honor Audio" or something else. But overall, the good outweighs the bad by a lot.

As for availability, we don't have official word on that yet at publishing time, but if you can purchase other Honor earbuds in your region right now, chances are these will be there too. You can expect these to cost in the neighborhood of 150 Euros (right around $160 converted directly right this minute). You'll see pricing in your area on the Honor store website once they're launched worldwide.