OnePlus Hops on the Clip-Style Wireless Earbuds Bandwagon

OnePlus isn’t exactly the biggest player in the phone world right now (especially in the U.S. and Europe), but wireless earbuds could be a different story. The China-based brand just announced the OnePlus Buds Clip, its first-ever pair of clip-style wireless earbuds. Like other clip-style wireless earbuds, the OnePlus Buds Clip follow a similar blueprint, with a ball for audio at the end of a C-shaped clip that wraps around your ears. OnePlus says the Buds Clip are co-created with Danish audio brand Dynaudio and come with two drivers—an 11mm woofer and a 9mm tweeter. © OnePlus Like the vast majority of open wireless earbuds, there’s no active noise cancellation here (Shokz’s hook-style OpenFit Pro are the only pair with noise-reducing tech), but there are some interesting features like AI translation, which is powered by a 6nm AI audio chip. Like the Shokz OpenDots 2, you’ll also get handy ear detection, which makes the earbuds interchangeable. That means you don’t have to worry about left or right; you just put them in your ears, and they switch accordingly. Battery life is fairly good thanks to the lack of noise-cancelling. OnePlus says the Buds Clip get 9.5 hours on a single charge if you’re streaming audio with the compressed AAC codec. If you’re using a hi-res format like LHDC, you’ll get an hour less. As is the case with any clip-style wireless earbuds, a lot of the appeal will rely on whether they’re comfortable, which is a hard thing to judge without wearing them myself, but I’m typically a fan of this C-shaped design, even if it’s more snug than the alternative hook-style. I like the colors, personally; there’s a matte pearl white and a “twilight rose” with a shiny metallic finish. © OnePlus Clip-style wireless earbuds are a pretty large market of their own these days, and OnePlus is just the latest company to hammer that point home. Bigger competitors are increasingly joining brands like Shokz and Bose with their own clip-style offerings, including Sony and, more recently, Samsung. As someone who’s used a lot of clip-style earbuds, I get it—they’re comfortable, they sound pretty damn good, and they’re great for exercising. Exactly how much the OnePlus Buds Clip will cost or whether they’re arriving in a market near you is still TBA, but OnePlus did list these on its global store, so here’s to hoping its ambitions for audio are broader than its plans for phones.