Xiaomi has listed the Xiaomi Clip, its first clip-on open-ear wireless earbuds, on its global website ahead of its launch in Paris on Tuesday 17th November. The page goes up almost six months after the earbuds launched in China in May at about USD 127 or KES 16,500, where Xiaomi’s Chinese store now discounts them to about USD 112 or KES 14,600.
Xiaomi has sold open-ear models before, including the ear-hook OpenWear Stereo Pro we covered in September 2025, which weighed 9.7g per earbud and looped over the ear. The Xiaomi Clip joins cuff-style rivals such as Samsung’s Galaxy Buds On and Baseus’s MC2 NC that clip onto the outer edge of the ear instead. Each 5.5g earbud links a speaker housing in front of the ear canal to a curved battery compartment behind the lobe with a memory titanium wire bridge across a 3.4mm gap. Because nothing plugs the ear canal, you still hear traffic on a run or colleagues at your desk.
How the clip design handles sound and calls
Leaving the ear canal open means sound can leak to people nearby, and Xiaomi skips active noise cancellation for music playback. Instead, each earbud aims a 4mm sound outlet at the ear canal and uses its 11mm driver, the speaker inside the earbud, to play inverted sound waves that cancel audio leaking outward. Xiaomi’s footnote still advises lowering the volume in quiet rooms.
For windy calls, each earbud pairs three microphones with a Voice Pickup Unit, a bone-conduction sensor that reads jaw vibrations when you speak to separate your voice from wind. The earbuds carry an IP57 rating to resist dust and survive a metre of fresh water for 30 minutes, though the vegan-leather case is not water-resistant. Xiaomi lists Sand Gold, Pearl White, Frost Purple and Graphite Black colours.
What the fine print says on Find My, LHDC 5.0 and battery life
For iPhone owners, the main draw is Apple’s Find My network, which uses nearby Apple devices to locate lost items on a map. Xiaomi’s footnotes add a catch: Find My requires an iPhone on iOS 18 or later and tracks only the 41.4g charging case, not the individual earbuds. Within Bluetooth 5.4 range, you can make the case play a chime, but Apple’s network cannot locate a loose earbud dropped away from the case.
On Xiaomi’s specification page, the 38-hour battery figure depends on which audio mode your phone uses. In lab tests with a Xiaomi 18 Pro at 50% volume, each 60mAh earbud lasts up to nine hours per charge, and the 510mAh USB-C case brings total playback to 38 hours. A 10-minute charge adds up to 3.5 hours. Those numbers apply only over the standard AAC codec. The earbuds also support LHDC 5.0, a high-resolution codec that transmits up to 48kHz audio across a 20Hz to 48kHz range. However, LHDC 5.0 on the Xiaomi Clip currently requires an Android 17 phone, and turning it on cuts battery life to six hours on the earbuds and 25 hours with the case, the same runtime as voice calls. As we explained with the OPPO Enco X4 in October, iPhones do not support LHDC and use AAC.
Any phone with the Xiaomi Earbuds app can pair with two devices at once and triple-press the case or triple-tap an earbud to record calls or live audio. Still, Xiaomi dropped the Super XiaoAI assistant, live translation and transcription from the Chinese version, and limits automatic audio handoff and two-pair sharing to Xiaomi and Redmi devices on HyperOS 3.
Xiaomi’s global page and listings in Singapore, Hong Kong, Thailand and Italy give no price or sale date ahead of Tuesday’s event. Xiaomi’s Kenyan site lists only Redmi Buds, sold at Avechi for KES 3,999 to KES 9,199. If you use an iPhone and want open-ear earbuds, the Xiaomi Clip is much friendlier to iOS than Samsung’s Galaxy Buds On, provided you remember Find My only watches the case.
Join the discussion