If you’ve been waiting for a new pair of workout headphones, you might have just found them. Beats isn’t always the quickest at getting out new products, but its first new spin on its top-selling Powerbeats line for four years is very, very welcome.
While we love the epic Beats Fit Pro, the $249/£249.95 Powerbeats Pro 2 add re-worked earhooks to the mix, giving you most AirPods Pro features but with intense fitness as their core reason for existing.
Indeed, the Beats Powerbeats Pro 2 have a special trick up their sleeve; they can track your heart rate. That’s going to be less useful for users with an Apple Watch (as your watch’s heart rate monitor will take precedence) but it’s going to be great for iOS users without a fitness watch (who use their phone to track workouts) or Android users. New LED optical sensors pulse over 100 times per second to measure your blood flow.
As with all new Beats gear, support for iOS users is baked into then iPhone as with AirPods (for one-touch pairing, automatic switching, Audio Sharing, hands-free Siri and Find My), while Android users can enable everything through the Beats app.
While support on Android for the heart rate monitoring is across the system. it’s not quite like that on iOS, with access restricted to a handful of apps at launch (presumably this will grow pretty quickly): Ladder, Nike Run Club, Open, Peloton, Runna, Slopes and YaoYao.
These earphones have the same H2 chip as the AirPods Pro 2. Features that have made it across include Active Noise Cancellation (ANC) and transparency mode, as well as Adaptive EQ and Personalised Spatial Audio with dynamic head tracking. There’s also Qi wireless charging support in the (rather large) case which you don’t get with the older Beats Fit Pro.
You’ll get about 10 hours of battery life out of each bud – which is excellent – with a total of around 45 hours in the case. If you run out, a five minute fast charge will get you around 90 minutes of listening time.
The Adaptive EQ tunes the audio in real-time based on the fit in your ear. An inward-facing microphone monitors the sound and then the low and mid frequencies are tuned to compensate for any issues.
For the first time, there are now five different sizes of eartips in the box to make sure you can get a fit that suits your ear. Beats says it tested the earphones with around 1,000 athletes to develop the fit and flexibility of the earhook, which has been reinforced with a nickel-titanium alloy so that it’s comfortable every time. As you’d expect they’re sweat and water-resistant (IPX4).
There are four colours available: Jet Black, Quick Sand, Hyper Purple, and my favourite – Electric Orange.
