Beats officially marked its India kick-off with the launch of the Beats Pill, Solo Buds and Solo 4 a few weeks back. With the official price tag of Rs 16,990, the Beats Pill is a portable Bluetooth speaker that's aimed for listening to your music when indoors in the company of a few people, or even outdoors. I have been using this Beats speaker for a few days and here's how my experience has been so far:
The Beats Pill has a familiar capsule-like design with a lanyard (comes pre-attached out of the box) on the right side. The Beats logo sits at the middle, on the front with buttons--separate volume buttons, multifunction key and power/pairing key--at the top. The USB type C ports sit right in the middle of the back. The metallic grille makes for the front half; while the back is formed of soft-touch-finish silicon. It comes in Champagne Gold (the one I tried), Statement Red as well as Matte Black colour options. It's an IP67 dust and water-resistant gadget that should be okay to be carried for showers, beach or under rainwater. Weighing about 680 grams, the Pill isn't too heavy or surprisingly light for its size - it's just about what you would expect it when trying for the first time.
For control buttons, long-pressing the power button switches it on or off and longer puts it into the pairing mode with which you also get a notification sound (and the adjoining LED light blinks) to confirm it's in the pairing mode. The speaker vibrates a little whenever it's turned on or off along with a short sound to confirm. The multifunction button in the middle can be used for answering calls and muting mic, or play, pause and skip tracks; the same soft-touch keys feel click-y enough and are conveniently placed.
The Pill comes with Bluetooth 5.3 support along with SBC and AAX audio codecs support, but no aptX or any other codecs. It can be paired over Bluetooth as well as USB type C for lossless playback. Sound quality on the speaker is satisfactory for most genres, in my experience. It's tilted upwards at 20 degrees for the sound to go upwards. It can get sufficiently loud to fill a 15x15 room with a few people inside. You get clear vocals alongside smooth background instruments playback while not sacrificing on the bass and sub-bass, which are rich as you would expect from a Beats product. It can be a little too sharp at times when it comes mids and highs but generally, there's decent details that you wouldn't mind it.
It works with both Android and iOS devices - requiring the Beats app on Android if you want to check on features, while they are in-built on iOS. The app is barebones, though, as you can't set custom EQ or change even basic stuff like treble and bass output from the speaker. Also, while I didn't have any connectivity options, there's no multipoint connectivity support to attach more than one source device. You can, though, attach two Pills via the app to get better stereo output using both speakers at once.
Regarding battery life, I found the speaker to last more than 22-24 hours on a single full charge. You can charge it even from your phone over USB type C if needed (much slower), if charging with a power adapter isn't available at the time.
All in all, the Beats Pill pack in enough to take on the likes of JBL's Charge 5 and Sony's ULT Field 1. The speaker has clear vocals, good instrument as well as rich bass when it comes to audio quality. It also has a good battery life along with dust and water-resistance to make it worth taking outdoors for your personal music needs.
