Beats Black and Yuzu Yellow colors are available at launch; Smoke Gray and Flame Blue will join in 2021. Availability from Apple starts on Wednesday, October 21 on apple.com. Authorized resellers will start selling Beats Flex on November 20.
Our detailed summaries should help you narrow down your research on finding the best Beats headphones. Their housing is light and remains comfortable for long listening sessions. With the help of ear fins, they’re also more stable than the Flex. They’re the cheapest earbuds to have a W1 chip for better iOS and macOS integration. They’re also one of the best Beats headphones and a great pair for your Apple ecosystem, although they work equally well on both operating systems.
If they’d come out at $100 or even $75, they would’ve been a hard pass from me. But at $50 they’re worth considering, especially if you want Apple-friendly earbuds and don’t want to shell out more for AirPods. For a lot of people that pesky wire is a dealbreaker, and I personally hadn’t regularly used a neckband-style headphone for a couple of years, so it was a bit of an adjustment to go back to it.
If you’re hoping to use these wireless earbuds for running or for other workouts, but you’re worried about them getting wet, then you should consider the JAM Audio TWS Athlete instead. Not only are they water-resistant but they also have ear hooks that keep them firmly in place – so they are actually more secure than the Beats Flex. As a result those earphones also sound more dynamic and three-dimensional when playing music that features “real” instruments. The Flex earbuds are well designed with a balanced fit featuring two pods either side of a flat, semi-flexible cable that rests on the back of the neck. The earbuds are then connected to the pods via further flat, flexible cables.
If you prefer the design of a behind-the-neck set of headphones, the Beats Flex deliver everything you could want at an amazing price. This can make it tricky to know if you’ve pressed it accurately. You get used to this arrangement quickly enough and on the bright side, you’ll never risk accidentally yanking the left earbud out when you use them. What’s odd about the Flex is that while overall battery life is better than their predecessor, fast-charging is actually worse. You now need 10 minutes to get a 1.5-hour boost, whereas the BeatsX could dish out two hours of extra time after five minutes of charging.
Apart from an aptX codec, the Flybuds C1 lack any other premium features or customization that you find on the Flex. The sound signature is more balanced than with other models in this range. Like all Apple headphones, the Beats Flex use SBC and beats studio3 AAC, the latter being a default Bluetooth codec. Multipoint for seamless switching between devices is possible thanks to the W1 chip, but only between Apple devices. On iOS, you can see a traditional pop-up animation with battery percentage.
Plus, they’re designed for workouts, so you don’t have to worry about mucking these up. One downside is they only last for six hours on a charge. On Android, you’ll need to download the Beats app from the Google Play Store.
If you fall into that camp, we can’t recommend the Beats Flex for you. After trying a few combinations of eartips we eventually landed on a decent seal and were finally able to test out the Beats Flex’s audio quality. What we heard is pretty much what you’d expect – a deep v-shaped sound that accentuates the highs and lows of the audio spectrum at the expense of the mids. I saw battery life drop from 60% to 55% when using the buds sporadically during a two-hour span. You can even leave them paired to a device for hours, inactive, and the battery levels will barely drop.