Belkin Soundform Clearfit earbuds review: Vibe check

At a recommended retail price of $89, the Belkin Soundform Clearfit are pretty thrifty for a set of sports-friendly earbuds. Still, you might be able to save some cash if you shop around. Check out the table below for a round-up of places you can buy the Belkin Soundform Clearfit earbuds in Australia.

Although the form-factor is a smidge thinner and the material design reads as more modern, the Belkin Soundform Clearfit scan as the type of earpiece that you'd clock someone wearing in an episode of Burn Notice.

These days though, open-ear headphones aren't just for semi-retired spies. Today's takes on the classic Bluetooth earpiece are often pitched with an emphasis on both fit and fitness. The Belkin Soundform Clearfit align with that paradigm perfectly. These headphones loosely wrap around your ears and beam sound directly into them.

The upsides here are that you feel more cognizant and aware of your surroundings. The downside is that the fit isn't as secure as you'd want nor is there any noise-cancelling. To make up (some of) that difference (and to help justify the bulkier form-factor of both the buds themselves and the carry case), the Belkin Soundform Clearfit do come with much bigger 14.8mm drivers.

All this is to say that if you're the kind of person who usually sticks with more traditional true wireless options like AirPods then there's also going to be an adjustment period.

One thing you'll find on the other side of that shift? Better battery life. The Belkin Soundform Clearfit offer a venerable 12 hours of battery life on a single charge. The carry-case adds another 18 hours for a total of 30 hours.

Other perks here include Bluetooth 5.3 connectivity, IPX5 sweat and dust resistance, USB-C fast-charging that gets you 90 minutes in just ten minutes of charging and a some microphone-adjacent optimisation that promise to make for clearer phone calls.

For the most part though, your mileage is going to live or die on how you feel about the open-ear form factor. Personally, I found it to be a bit of a mixed bag. The Belkin Soundform Clearfit felt weird enough on my ears that I often found myself looking up pictures online to confirm I was wearing them the right way. Then again, I've rarely found earbuds of this style to be the right fit for me. While I wouldn't say that these Belkin buds were that much of an improvement over the level of comfort I got from Shokz' Open Pro Run 2, I wouldn't say that they felt like that much of a downgrade either.

Aside from any anxiety you may have about the form-factor though, the experience here isn't terribly different from what you can expect of a set of in-ear headphones. You charge the Belkin Soundform Clearfit up, pair them to your chosen device and you'll be good to go.

Each earbuds has a set of touch-sensitive triggers that are used as shortcuts for various functions. The control scheme here isn't the most intuitive I've ever encountered but Belkin have smartly printed a set of reminders on the inside of the charging case. Even if this isn't the most high-tech solution, it's a nice touch that helps make up a little for the absence of a physical pairing button.

While I was frequently impressed by the sound quality of the audio that Belkin Soundform Clearfit beamed into my ears, I often to crank up the volume to deal with ambient noise bleeding in from the outside world. That caveat really tells the whole story here. I understand that the situational awareness that comes with that situational awareness is a big part of the sell for open-ear headphones like this but that compromise was one that I really struggled to with.

If you're wearing these on the street, they'll struggle to keep up. If you're working from home, you'll probably be good enough to get by with. It feels like you have to be listening to the Belkin Soundform Clearfit in an almost silent setting in order to get the most out of what the hardware inside them can do. Even then though, I found myself constantly distracted by how loosely they hung on my ears.

Put through our earbuds testing playlist, the Belkin Soundform Clearfit fell short on many of the fronts you could expect them to given both the price and the open-ear design. 

There were a few brightspots here, like Carly Rae Jepsen's "I Didn't Come Here To Dance" and "Blinding Lights" by The Weeknd. However, more often than not (and especially with older tracks), the Belkin Soundform Clearfit struggled to do justice to the material it was working with. It especially fell short on songs with a lot of bass (such as Childish Gambino's "3005") and struggled to make sense of more chaotic tracks like "The Funeral Portrait" by Opeth. Even when the soundscapes produced by the Belkin Soundform Clearfit had a little bit of breadth, they rarely offered much in the way of depth.

A few years ago, that might not have been that big a deal. These are sub-$100 headphones after all. However, noise-cancelling is far from exclusive to premium headphones nowadays. It won't cost you that much (and it won't take that much searching) to track down a set of earbuds that sound significantly better than these do if that's more of a priority than having a set that offer the extra situational awareness.

As for the microphone on the Belkin Soundform Clearfit, it's mostly usable but rarely distinguished.

Most manufacturers that play at this more affordable end of the market don't put more than the bare minimum amount of work into making the microphones on their earbuds sound good, so the little bit of optimisation that Belkin has done here does a lot to put them above that very low bar. That said, the call quality here is far short of what more premium in-ear options or an comparable alternative with a stem-style mic is able to offer. To head that difference for yourself, click on the button below.

Ultimately, everything that works (and doesn't) about the Belkin Soundform Clearfit has to square up against that budget-friendly price-tag. $89 isn't $50 but it's still a pretty great price to pay for a set of earbuds. In a world where Apple regularly charges hundreds of dollars for its cheapest set of headphones, paying this little can seem like a bargain.

If you're on the fence about open-ear headphones though, I'd hesitate to recommend these headphones as the downsides that come with that style make themselves very clear very quickly. More open minded about the form-factor? You'll probably get more mileage out of these earbuds than I did.

The Belkin Soundform Clearfit sound pretty good for the money but that disclaimer can only extend so far, especially if you're not sold on the style involved.