What you need to know
- Beats Solo Pro arrive on Oct 30.
- They'll sell for $299.95.
- ANC and W1 chip are confirmed.
The evergreen Beats Solo headphones have a new upgrade. Welcome to Beats Solo Pro, complete with Pure Adaptive Noise Cencelling (Pure ANC) and Apple's H1 chip thrown in. They're the same on-ear design, but upgraded to look and feel a little more special.
SlashGear spent some time with the new headphones and say that while they're instantly recognizable as Beats, they have a new grown-up design. We can also expect special colors thanks to at least one partnership deal as well.
They're clearly Beats headphones at first glance, though refined and more mature in their design. Gone is the glossy plastic of the old Beats Solos, replaced with a matte finish. There'll be three core colors – Black, Ivory, and Gray – as well as three "More Matte" colors – Dark Blue, Light Blue, and Red – in partnership with musician Pharrell Williams.
The new headphones fold, just like the older model. You get a carry case in the box to help with portability, too. Beats wants you to take these things wherever you go and battery life bears that out. We're told you can expect up to 22 hours on a single charge even when Pure ANC is active. That's hugely impressive and when you turn noise cancelling off that jumps to 40 hours. Just 10 minutes of charge gets you three hours of use, too. That'll be Apple's H1 at work, then.
It's early days to know for sure just how good that Pure ANC is at drowining out noise but SlashGear says that initial, limited testing was positive. What we do know is that Beats has gone for the mimimalist look, with buttons cut to a, well, minimum.
Physical controls have been pared back to the bare minimum. On one side, the Beats logo acts as a multifunction button: tap to play/pause, double-tap to skip tracks, long-press to trigger Siri or the Google Assistant. You can say "Hey Siri" if you're using an iOS device, too. The pad also rocks up and down, to control volume.
That "Hey Siri" feature is made possible by, you guessed it. The Apple W1.
The new Beats Solo Pro headphones go on sale on October 30 for $299.95 and they're available for pre-order now. We'll be waiting to try these things out before we can comment on their sound quality.
