People love to share their music these days. No longer are they content with listening to their music in isolation on their big headphones.
The problem is that many smartphones and tablets have small speakers that are simply not loud enough when you want others to listen to your tunes.
Enter the Beats Pill, a mini Bluetooth speaker that aims to set itself apart from the competition with its unique eye catching design, sound quality and extra features like NFC (Near Field Communications) connectivity.
Not a Jagged Little Pill
True to its name, the Pill features a unique cylindrical shape that is decidedly different from your average square shaped Bluetooth speaker. It is very light at just 310g and can easily be dropped into a bag.
In case you do want to take it with you, the Pill comes shipped with a handy carrying case that also prevents it from getting scratched up.
It comes in a variety of colours too ranging from bright yellow, orange, pink to more conservative colours like black white and grey.
The downside though is that the carrying case adds a little bit of bulk, so you may have trouble fitting it into a narrow laptop bag.
We liked how Beats included a large rubber base that helped prevent the speaker from vibrating too much and kept it firmly in place.
As music is supposed to be wirelessly streamed to the speaker, the Pill has very few input options, though it has audio input and output for connecting non-Bluetooth devices.
The Bluetooth connection range is fairly good so long as you are two to three feet away, serving well when paired to a laptop or desktop speaker.
There are also very few buttons on the device with only two volume control buttons lining the top and a single power button behind.
Hiding in plain sight, the large Beats logo in the centre can be long pressed to initiate pairing mode with your laptop, smartphone or tablet.
The bright red button can also be used to answer calls when it is connected to your smartphone and pause the music. The speaker can only accept one audio source so if you are listening to something via Bluetooth and a NFC phone gets paired, it will stop the music and continue from the next source.
Alternatively, if you have a NFC device you can just tap it on the Pill to connect it right away. We just tapped to pair an NFC-capable Samsung Galaxy Note 2 with it and the speaker was good to go, blasting music in a matter of moments.
