audio
JBL Puts a Touchscreen on the Live 4 Case, Again
Three fits, one gimmicky charging case with a bigger display, and a 199 euro price that suddenly looks competitive against Sony and Bose.
The charging case is supposed to be the boring part. JBL clearly disagrees. With the new Live 4 family, the company has doubled down on the touchscreen case it first tried with the Live 3 series, giving it a bigger display and a fresh coat of software called Smart OS 3.0. Whether anyone actually needs to swipe through EQ settings on a piece of plastic the size of a Zippo is a different question.
The lineup splits into three: Live Buds 4 (compact sealed in-ear), Live Beam 4 (stem with silicone tips), and Live Flex 4 (stem, no tips, sits in the outer ear). Buds 4 and Beam 4 use 10mm drivers; Flex 4 gets bumped to 12mm, which is JBL's quiet admission that open-fit buds need more cone to compensate for the bass they leak into the room. All three claim Hi-Res Audio support over wireless, which still mostly means LDAC marketing rather than anything you can verify by ear.
The case display now handles swipe gestures for notifications, track skipping, EQ tweaks, and a customisable home screen with user wallpapers. It is genuinely a neat party trick. It is also a second screen to charge, scratch, and forget. JBL has not said anything about how the OLED affects case battery, and in a category where Sony and Bose are still winning on raw ANC and codec discipline, a screen is not an answer to either.
ANC is now 4-mic True Adaptive 2.0, calls run through six microphones with AI noise reduction, and JBL quotes 40, 48, and 50 hours total battery (ANC off) for Buds, Beam, and Flex respectively. Pricing is the headline: all three sit at 199.99 euro, undercutting the Sony WF-1000XM5 and Bose QuietComfort Ultra by a comfortable margin. Available now via jbl.com, with Beam 4 and Flex 4 in seven colours and Buds 4 in four.
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