Introduction

Amazfit Up is another pair of open-ear earbuds that wants to let you listen to your audio without entirely blocking up your ears.

While Amazfit is better known for its smartwatches, it has dabbled in making earbuds having launched the heart rate-tracking Powerbuds Pro in 2021 and the sleep-focused Zenbuds the year before. The Amazfit Up is an entirely different proposition, featuring air conduction technology in a design made for workouts and commutes.

You won’t have to pay as much as its costs to pick up a pair of Bose or Shokz open-ear earbuds either, making it a much cheaper route to enjoying your sound in a safer fashion.

Price

The Amazfit Up launched in October 2024, priced at £44.90 making it one of the cheapest ways to get a set of open-ear earbuds on your ears.

That’s significantly less than the Bose Ultra Open Earbuds (£299), the Shokz OpenFit Air (£94) and Sony LinkBuds Open (£179).

You’d have to be looking at open-ear earbuds like the JLab Flex Open earbuds (£49.99) and the Sivga SO2 (£34.95) as other affordable alternatives to the Amazfit Up.

Design

• Clip-on design
• Built-in physical controls
• IPX4 water resistant design

The Amazfit Up doesn’t offer a conventional earbud or open-ear earbud look, but does follow in the footsteps of the likes of the Huawei FreeClip, JLab Flex Open or Soundcore Aeroclip.

The clip-on earbuds sit on the earlobe, with the part packing the speaker sits in front of your ear canal while the part that houses the controls is just behind the ear. At 5g per earbud, they’re very light – lighter than Huawei’s FreeClip (5.6g). When they’re on, they’re pretty easy to forget they’re there.

They’re made mainly from polymer – similar to the cases featured on Amazfit’s smartwatches. Maybe it could benefit from adding some softer material to bolster the pretty comfortable overall fit. Comfort isn’t something that perhaps needs to be looked at.

The secureness of the earbuds in general has been find when working at a desk, strolling around or wearing them during stationary workouts. As soon as I upped the intensity and started to sweat more, the element of the earbuds where the controls sit started to slide around my ear that I had to nudge them back in place throughout the course of the workout.

Those controls are thankfully of the physical kind and Amazfit does an impressive job of tucking them neatly into the earbuds.

These buttons let you play and pause audio, skip tracks with a double tap, and can be pressed to communicate with your phone’s smart assistant or Amazfit’s Zepp Flow voice control on its watches. You can adjust volume too.

I found the controls work fine, I just have an issue with their positioning where it can be awkward to use them for more frenetic exercise where reaching for them can disrupt the fit.

The Amazfit Up come with a IPX4 water resistant rating, which means they can handle splashes of water as opposed to being submerged in it. The case they sit in is a pretty pocket-friendly one and securely holds the buds in place during charging.

It’s powered up by USB-C and you’ve also got a single LED light up front to let you know when they’re paired up and topping up the battery.

Features

• Bluetooth 5.3
• Six hours battery
• Bluetooth multipoint

The Amazfit Up pairs to devices with Bluetooth 5.3 and are capable of pairing with up to two devices at the same time. They’re designed to pair with select Amazfit smartwatches so you can use them to activate the Zepp Flow voice controls, hear real-time workout updates or listen to music on any watches that include a built-in music player.

Battery life is just fine without pushing the boundaries of what to expect from a set of open-ear earbuds or earbuds. They promise up to six hours off a single charge and that’s exactly what I got out of them.

I used them with the volume pretty high and an hour’s listening saw the battery drop by around 20%, which works out to 5 hours. Bring that volume down and it’ll certainly get to six hours. There’s no fast charging mode, so if you hit zero battery, they can take anywhere up to 2 hours to fully charge.

Sound Quality

• Good, but not best in class open-ear sound
• No EQ support

The Amazfit Up uses air conduction to deliver its open-ear sound experience and that works by placing speakers in close proximity to your ears to generate sound without needing to put something directly inside of your ears.

I’ve been using them paired to an iPhone, Samsung Android phone, a MacBook and have connected them to Amazfit’s T-Rex 3 smartwatch. The sound performance across those devices has been fine, but by no means standout.

The first thing to notice here is that unlike other open-ear earbuds, they don’t roar with power and that can make using them in busier or windier outdoor environments in particular a challenge as they can quickly get drowned out by exterior sounds.

In quiet environments, you get a much better sense of the overall sound profile, which veers more on prioritising clarity over anything else and that makes them a good match for podcasts and audiobooks and using them to handle calls.

Other aspects of the performance struggles. Bass performance is a bit muddy, there’s not a lot of detail in the mids department and the treble feels a bit harsh in places. It’s where having some EQ support would be welcomed but that’s not available.

As a result, when I turned to more bass-heavy tracks like Jamie xx’s Gosh or FKA twigs’ Two Weeks, you get a clear sense of the unbalanced and more muddled sound you’ll experience. On Van Morrison’s Into the Mystic there’s evidence of some more likeable warmth and there are instances where what the Amazfit Up offers is enough. Just not the best you’ll get from open-ear earbuds right now.

Should you buy it?

FAQs