The Flex are Beats most affordable earphones to date, and they’re ever so close to being considered a bonafide bargain. The magnetic buds that debuted on the X make a welcome return, and the cable is a little beats flex review longer than you might expect as Beats’ style is for it to curl round and sit on either shoulder. Sounds fiddly, but in practice the Flex do this naturally, and that’s down to what they’re made from.
Without the H1 chip, you also won’t get hands-free “Hey Siri” support, so you’ll have to press the voice assistant button on the left-side neckband housing in order to access Siri. With nearly identical neckband housings on each side, it takes a little bit of practice to remember which functions are located where, but once you learn that it’s easy to control things by feel. Unlike AirPods Pro, Beats Flex don’t have active noise cancellation, but I still found they did a pretty good job shutting out background noise and letting me focus on what I was listening to. There’s some added thump to the drum loop, and the sub-bass synth hits that punctuate the beat are delivered with power and depth—these earphones will not disappoint lovers of boosted bass. The vocals are delivered cleanly and clearly, though some sibilance is added to the mix.
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.
At either end of the U are elongated plastic housings that contain the battery and electronics (including the Apple-designed W1 Bluetooth chip), as well as the USB-C charging port and the power/pairing button. These plastic housings are where Apple has focused most of its redesign (cost-cutting?) efforts. Instead of placing the microphone and controls in an inline pod on the left earbud’s wire, these are now contained in the left housing.
Beats Flex come with four sizes of eartips, so most people shouldn’t have much trouble finding a good fit. The soft, pliable eartips are relatively easy to swap out, but you also don’t have to worry about them coming loose beats flex review unintentionally. Sign up for Lab Report to get the latest reviews and top product advice delivered right to your inbox. Using the Voice Memos app on an iPhone 8, we could understand every word recorded clearly.
Thanks to silicone ear tips with a wider dome, they completely seal off the ear canal. The difference in background noise loudness before and after is quite noticeable. Of course, there are still some features only reserved for Apple users, like Apple’s easy pairing feature, and Audio Sharing.