Beats has always had something of a hard ride from the audiophiles of the world.

Often criticised for being overpriced, too bass-heavy the brand has defied this snobbishness and ended up selling absolutely bucketloads of headphones.

While in the past some of the criticisms levelled against Beats would have been accurate the company has gone through something of a renaissance, starting just before being bought by Apple and reaching fever pitch in the last 12-months.

The results? Todays Beats headphones aren’t too expensive for what they offer, they’re not as bass-heavy and they’re a million miles from the snobbishness that has hung over them.

The latest example of this turnaround are the Studio3 Wireless headphones. They’re Beats’ flagship wireless headphones that offer Pure ANC noise-cancelling, improved battery-life and Apple’s very own W1 audio processor inside.

On the outside they look much the same as the previous Studio headphones.

A soft-touch matte plastic body keeps them light while small metal accents and leather earcups remind you that these are still premium headphones.

The design has always been sturdy and even without the carrying case our pair brushed off being thrown into a bag each day without any wear and tear.

The colour choices are of course influenced by Apple’s iPhone line-up but they’re implemented in a way that’s stylish and non-obtrusive.

The earcups are soft and well-cushioned making them comfortable on the ears, if we had one complaint it is that we did feel some minor pinching on the top of the head during listening periods of over an hour or so. That being said, out of the competition we’ve used only Sennheiser’s PXC 550′s stand out as being able to give us a full flight’s worth of comfortable listening.

It’s a tough one to call a judgement on because honestly it can sometimes just depend on the shape of your head.

Thanks to Apple’s W1 chip, setting these headphones up on an Apple device is fantastically easy – you simply turn them on and they’ll pop up on your iPhone. You then press connect and just like that they’re connected not only to your iPhone but also your Apple Watch, MacBook and iPad. It’s a neat trick and it’s one that sadly is exclusive to Apple’s family of devices. Thankfully if you’re an Android user, setup is still incredibly simple and just involves diving into the Bluetooth menu of your phone.

The Beats Studio3 offer a brand-new type of noise-cancelling called Pure ANC.

It then looks for anomalies in the waveform between the two and makes tiny adjustments to best fit the original piece of music.

What’s pretty astonishing about all this is that it’s doing it 50,000 times every second.

Now where the Studio3′s really excel is with battery. It is obscenely good.

Beats claim you can get 22 hours of wireless playback with Pure ANC. It’s not lying either. We used ours for a full week of commuting and occasional listening in the office and found that we only needed to fully charge them once. If you turn the noise-cancelling off this increases to a whopping 40 hours.

Having this kind of battery life is absolutely vital for wireless headphones as one of the biggest barriers is the stigma that they become just one more thing to have to charge at the end of the day. If you only have to do that once a week it suddenly makes the whole proposition much more reasonable.

London’s electric black cab has, we think it’s fair to say, been a long time coming.

Well today the company that makes the vehicles has confirmed that six of them are currently driving around the capital as they go through the final and perhaps most gruelling test environment: London’s traffic.

The six vehicles and their drivers will be collecting data that records not only the emissions coming from the vehicle but also looks to asses the state of London’s charging network.

Each car is driven by an electric motor which can then be charged via a 1.3 litre petrol-powered generator.

The car has a fully-electric range of around 70-miles but if you turn on the petrol generator that range increases to some 400-miles.

While it’s certainly not going to compete with the range of say a Tesla, these vehicles have been designed to at the very least comply with the “zero emission capable” requirement for all London taxis from January 2018.

Compared to the previous petrol-powered black cabs, the new TX5 has a larger cabin that contains six seats, WiFi, USB-charging and the ability to process contactless payments.

The driver meanwhile will have access to a full-touchscreen that provides them with a SatNav specifically designed to show congestion while also showing every available charging location in London.

In addition the screen will also feature integrated ride-hailing services including Gett, myTaxi and Kabbee.

The cabs are expected to get a full roll out on London’s streets later this year.