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The Beats Pill+ is the company’s first post-Apple acquisition product

The Beats Pill+ is our first real look at what products from the company will look like after its acquisition by Apple in May of last year.
By
October 7, 2015
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While products with the Beats name on them have shipped since the company was acquired by Apple last year, but they had been in the works long before the deal was made official. Today the company introduced its latest product, the Beats Pill+, giving us the first glimpse of what to expect from the company moving forward.

On the exterior, the new Beats Pill+ certainly looks like it will fit in better alongside other products in an Apple Store, but the company has more to say about what has changed on the inside. That can’t be a bad thing, as we found a lot to complain about in our review of the Beats Pill 2.0.

“When you obsess about sound the way that we do at Beats, portable Bluetooth speakers can be very tricky,” Beats president Lake Wood said in the press release announcing the new speaker. “We spent countless days, weeks, months testing for that perfect combination of form and function – small enough to travel but still big enough to feel the emotion of the music. That’s what you get with Pill+.”

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The Pill+ is slightly larger than the original Pill, which should allow for bigger, hopefully better sound. Battery life has also been improved: Beats is claiming 12 hours of playtime, up from the 7 we got in the Pill 2.0. The speaker will make heavy use of the Beats Pill+ app, available for iOS and Android, which allows two sources to connect via Bluetooth at once or add a second Pill+ speaker for true stero.

The Beats Pill+ goes on sale next month via the Apple website and authorized Beats retailers. The price will be $229.95, which is down from the $299 MSRP for the Beats Pill 2.0, though the older speaker can now be found for less than $200.

We’re trying to remain cautiously optimistic – after all, it would be tough for this to be a step backward, considering its predecessor.