Beats Fit Pro review: Sporty bass vibes

The Beats Fit Pro are what you get if you take Apple's AirPods Pro and make them a better fit for, well, getting fit.

Unlike Apple's white stemmed buds, the Beats Fit Pro are equipped with wingtips to offer a more secure design for exercise, and offers features to make them useful when it's time to run or get lunging.

Comfort aside, you're getting features like active noise cancellation to drown out the world as you work out, a transparency one to let the world back in, and Apple's H1 chip is also powering performance.

• Buy the best: The best true wireless earbuds reviewed

Outside of exercise time, there's the same Spatial Audio and automatic switching between Apple devices, as the AirPods Pro and this is a set of buds that works with Android devices with a dedicated app serving up most of the same features too.

At $199/£199, the Fit Pro come in $50/£50 cheaper than the AirPods Pro and Beats' Powerbeats Pro Buds ($249/£219). They're still not cheap buds to buy, but they do promise a lot of what Apple's top-end truly wireless earbuds offer for less.

So are the Beats Fit Pro the ones you need in your ears? We've been putting them to the test to find out. Here's our comprehensive verdict.

• Apple AirPods Pro (2020) review

About our review

All of our hearables reviews adhere to our strict in-depth testing policy. We test every aspect in-depth, and benchmarking against key competitors so you can make an informed choice. You can read our editorial policy to find out why you can trust Wareable reviews.

Beats Fit Pro: Design and fit

Fit on sports headphones is everything. Yes, that's true of all headphones, but if you're energetically moving about with them and they fly out or slip about, then they've failed at their most important job.

To make sure the Fit Pro do pass that fit test, they use a wingtip-style design where those wing tips aren't removable, but do offer a little flex at the tip to make sure you can squeeze them securely into the inside of your ears. That's matched up with some pretty standard looking silicone ear tips and they come in sets of small, medium and large tips. The medium ones are already in place when you first take them out of the case.

That medium set worked well for us before we took the fit test, which you can do either in your iPhone settings or through the Beats Android app to make sure you're getting the best seal for sound and active noise cancellation.

We've worn these buds for slow and quick paced runs, indoor rowing time and HIIT workouts and they have not budged. What we would say however that unlike a lot of sporty buds around this price range, you do notice those buds are there in your ears, particularly over longer periods of use.

We used them for over two hours of running and found the tips can ever so slightly press inside of the ears. It's not hugely uncomfortable but it's noticeable enough.

These buds are fit to handle sweat and carry an IPX4 rating to give it that added sweat and water resistance protection. We've done plenty of tough workouts with them and they haven't slipped or slid around or caused issues in terms of connection drop outs.

These feel like great buds for short, sharp workouts, but we're not sure if these are the ideal buds to be tackling a marathon or an ultramarathon with purely because of that noticeable bit of pressure they do seem to deliver on longer use.

There are controls baked into both sides of these buds, which are the physical kind that let you can press to play/pause, double press to skip a track or triple press to go back a track. There isn't a way to adjust volume however.

Those controls on the move work reasonably well. The triple press is certainly trickier to master if you're running at speed, but physical controls over the touch kind are definitely a better fit for exercise so we're glad that Apple and Beats has gone down this route.

If you care about colors, then there's four in total. We had the Stone Purple versions, which are certainly more pink than purple, but if you like something with a more eye-catching look, you do have the option to do that here.

Beats Fit Pro: Sound quality

Power and bass are definitely the kind of words you'd associate with Beats headphones in general and it's no different with the Beats Fit Pro.

There's no EQ settings or the ability to tinker with the sound profile, so what you get out of the box is what you have to live with.

Doing that fit test as we mentioned, does ensure you get the right kind of seal with the ear tips to isolate that sound, but that sound is undeniably bass heavy with a little a bit of sparkle in the treble department and some welcome finesse and detail when you prefer to dial down that volume and power.

It's overall an enjoyable sound for workouts that feels very similar to using the Powerbeats Pro, albeit with less power. Is it the best sound you can get at this price? We'd be inclined to say you can get something more balanced for less, so as always with Beats, it's made for those who love booming bass.

We'd add that having used them with both an iPhone and Android phone, we felt like we got a little more in soundstage and warmth from that sound paired to an iPhone listening to the same tracks across the two phones.

Like Apple's AirPods Pro, you're getting active noise cancellation support to block out external sounds and a Transparency mode that uses the external microphones to let sound back in.

These modes can be enabled from the iPhone, Beats Android app or from the controls on the buds themselves.

The active noise cancellation does a good job dampening the sound of traffic and wind to make sure your music or whatever you're listening to is the priority sound. You can also set up ANC to work on a single bud, if some reason you need to do that.

The transparency mode works perfectly fine, bringing outside back in, but unlike some buds around this price, you don't have control over the level of exterior sound that's let back in and mixed in with the audio playing through the buds.

Beats Fit Pro: Smart features

If you want to take calls, the Fit Pro can detect when you're speaking to improve call quality and uses dual microphones to locate your voice and a digital processor to block out external noise. The call quality performance is on par with what you'll get with the AirPods Pro. They'll handle calls admirably and should satisfy most on that front.

On the connectivity front, we had no problems pairing them up to both Android and iPhones either and the Bluetooth range you can enjoy on them is strong if you can't be right next to you phone.

Beats Fit Pro Android app (Left and centre) and iPhone settings (right)

Apple users will get a few more features at their disposal like Spatial Audio, which does work really well for watching films and the presence of Apple's H1 chip also means you can effortlessly switch between connections with your iPhone, MacBook or iPad. There's Siri integration, which works hands-free or by pressing down the multi function button the buds, once that's set up in the settings on your iPhone.

They also include the useful Audio Sharing feature, will lets you share what you're listening to with another pair of Beats headphones or Apple AirPods. Perhaps most useful though is the Find My mode to help locate your buds if you've forgotten where you last put them down

The Beats Android app still offers a fair amount of settings and features to tinker with. One-touch pairing worked no problem for us for starters. You can adjust physical controls, perform the ear tip test and choose whether the microphone moves from left to right or is fixed to improve handling calls.

You'll certainly get a fuller Beats Fit Pro experience when it's paired with an iPhone, but it's certainly not a bad one if you've got them hooked up to an Android phone either.

Beats Fit Pro: Battery life

In terms of what you can expect on the battery life front, it entirely depends on whether you're operating them with ANC and Transparency modes in full use or you're not using them at all.

If you're using one of those two listening modes, you can expect up to 6 hours of battery life with 18 hours on top with a full charged case.

When you turn ANC or Transparency modes off, you get 7 hours of battery life to go with that 18 hours charge held in the case.

We'd say those numbers pretty much reflect our experiences using the Fit Pro. Just over 30 minutes of running saw the battery drop from 100% to 92% and that was with ANC enabled. So that's an 8% drop-off. We'd say you're basically looking at 5-6 hours with ANC.

If you compare that to the pricier AirPods Pro, those will give you 4.5 hours with the same listening modes in use or 5 hours with them turned off. So you're getting more battery for less money. There are cheaper headphones with ANC from the likes of Jabra, Bose and Jaybird that will give you a little more in the battery department, but it's there and thereabout with the competition.

You do get a useful Fast Fuel charging mode here too, which is essentially the same as what you'll find on the AirPods Pro and gets you an hour of playtime from just a 5-minute charge. So you'll be topping up on battery every time you drop them back in the case.

Speaking of that case, it uses USB-C style charging and it's not the smallest case accompanying a pair of truly wireless sports buds. Jabra's Elite 7 Active, the Jaybird Vista 2 and the AirPods Pro have smaller cases. The slippery surface on the case actually meant it slipped out of our Flipbelt running belt on a couple of occasions as well. It will fit in a shorts pocket no problem, but if you're looking for a small, light case to exercise with, you might be a little disappointed on that front.