Beats may have recently redesigned the Beats Fit Pro to be more comfortable and secure, but the company’s latest offering is still no match for its other pair of fitness-centric earbuds: the Powerbeats Pro 2. Luckily, the latter in-ears are on sale at Amazon, Walmart, and Best Buy for around $199.95 ($50 off), their second-best price to date.
As you might have guessed, the Powerbeats Pro 2 have been one of our favorite pairs of earbuds for sports and working out since they arrived on the scene early last year. They feature smaller, more comfortable earhooks than the prior model and boast wireless charging, along with an array of updated microphones that do a great job masking unwanted noise while listening to music and taking calls. Their marquee feature, however, is their heart rate monitoring, which leverages built-in sensors on each earbud and integrates well with apps from Nike, Runna, Open, Peloton, and others. Unsurprisingly, you can also quickly view various metrics in Apple Fitness Plus, such as heart rate and calories burned.
Like other Beats earbuds, the noise-canceling Powerbeats Pro 2 are also platform-agnostic, at least to a degree. They do support a handful of Apple-only features — most notably, dynamic head tracking for spatial audio, hands-free Siri access, and Find My integration — but Android users do get a subset of features, including one-touch pairing and some simple customization when it comes to controls. Sadly, though, they only carry an IPX4 rating, which falls short of the IP57 rating found on Apple’s newer AirPods Pro 3. That means that, while water- and sweat-resistant, they don’t offer any dust resistance.
Nonetheless, when you pair the Pro 2 with all the features you do get — as well as their easy-to-use physical controls and terrific transparency mode — you’re left with a well-rounded pair of fitness earbuds that should suit pretty much everybody, regardless of their OS of choice.