Beats Flex review 56 facts and highlights

The earbuds themselves are magnetic, attaching to each other back to back when not in use. The neckband is also flat and designed to prevent your Beats Flex headphones getting tangled up when they’re in your pocket, and let us just say thank the lord for that. Beats Flex are actually a replacement for the old BeatsX earbuds, which were also rocking the neckband design.

These earbuds come with wingtips that can be attached for a more secure fit. Wingtips come in handy for sports and other physical activities. When used correctly, they prevent the earbuds from falling off.

Hopefully, this is a sign that Apple will soon ditch lightning cables altogether so that we can have one USB charging standard to rule them all. Fortunately, there’s an impressive 12-hour battery packed into these headphones, and even more impressive is the Fast Fuel feature that gives you 1.5-hour of battery life from a 10-minute charge. View Gallery 10 imagesBeats Flex are wireless headphones where the buds are tethered to a flexible neckband. The end of each side of the neckband has an end-cap that houses the battery, buttons, and technology. The cable is flat linguini style and the neckband portion is thicker and with some reinforcement to mostly keep it shaped for your neck.

I think the best customer for the Beats Flex is anyone looking to replace a set of wired earbuds with something wireless that won’t break the bank doing it. The target audience here isn’t the person looking at AirPods or other true wireless earbuds that are more than twice the cost of the Flex, and the audio quality/features reflect that. And, although I’m never a big fan of the in-line controls you find on neckband-style earphones, I don’t mind those on the Beats Flex. The multi-purpose button is located on a different face of the left remote to the volume controls, meaning you never inadvertently press one instead of the other. And this multi-purpose button only very subtly protrudes, so it’s unlikely you’ll knock it by accident. As you’d expect, they come with a range of different earbud sizes in the box – four to be precise – to help ensure a snug fit.

beats flex review

As long as you have more than an hour’s worth of power, it will glow white. There are two thicker portions of the strap that help weigh the rigid wires down, and give somewhere for the innards and battery to live. This is where you’ll find the USB-C port for charging, a mic for taking calls and chatting to Siri/Google Assistant and a couple of buttons. All these buttons are easy and reliable to press, with firm feedback and a nice click.

I think I prefer the simpler Beats Flex layout, which helps reduce weight (they’re 8% lighter than BeatsX) without compromising usability. The left-side housing also includes a black patch where the microphone lives, as well as the USB-C port. The launch of Beats Flex comes at the perfect time, given that Apple has stopped including wired EarPods in the box with new purchases of iPhones, even older models that used to include them.

Athletic listeners may want to invest in the Beats Fit Pro instead. This pair of noise cancelling earbuds houses the H1 chip and has a 6-hour battery life. You get premium features like Apple spatial audio with head tracking, an IPX4 build, and comfortable, secure fit. This is currently the priciest set of Beats earbuds but may just be worth it for the right listener. The original Beats X sold for around £120-£130 in the UK, and over the last few years they’ve slowly slipped down to £60-£90 depending on where you looked.

It goes without saying, but at this price the Beats Flex also doesn’t offer noise cancellation, either. The right eartips can help provide some passive noise isolation by sealing off your ear canal, but there’s no fancy noise-cancellation tech inside beats studio3 of them to block out unwanted noise on your next plane flight. Besides hands-free Siri, the more expensive H1 Chip supports Bluetooth 5 versus the W1’s Bluetooth 4.2, which means you’ll get a slightly longer battery life with the H1 Chip, too.

Magnetic earbuds automatically play music when they’re in your ears and pause when they’re attached around your neck. Executive Editor David Carnoy has been a leading member of CNET’s Reviews team since 2000. He covers the gamut of gadgets and is a notable reviewer of mobile accessories and portable audio products, including headphones and speakers. He’s also an e-reader and e-publishing expert as well as the author of the novels Knife Music, The Big Exit and Lucidity. All the titles are available as Kindle, iBooks, Nook e-books and audiobooks. If you tried the BeatsX before, then you know what to expect here.