Beats Pill Review

Likes

The Beats Pill is small but mighty. The small, sleek, pill-shaped speaker slides easily into a backpack pocket and looks classy on a side table in your living room. We enjoyed its playful sound mix and the controlled handling of dynamic shifts across genres. It plays extra punchy, powerful sound, with the bass and treble taking center stage. We loved listening to this speaker for upbeat tracks like “Evacuate The Dancefloor” by Cascada, which sound extra energetic and punchy.

The Pill can play music uninterrupted for more than two days without need a charge. That's if you're listening non-stop. If, like most normal people, you take a break now and then, it will last through a few weeks of daily listening. We pushed our luck at one point and let the battery drain before heading out to a friend's, but luckily we were able to get 2 hours of playtime after a quick 10-minute charge.

We have both iOS and Android users on our testing team. Those of us with an iPhone found that pairing was super quick and easy, literally taking about 5 seconds before we were able to start listening. It also has one of the largest connection ranges. We were able to wander around the house and out in the backyard without annoying people inside the house with sputtering, spotty music.

This speaker is about the size of a Smart Water bottle, and weighs about the same. We found the slim, rounded shape was actually so satisfying to hold, and it comes with a lanyard if you want to hang it up on a coat hook or towel rack for a makeshift shower speaker. It also has an IP67 rating, which means it's waterproof for up to 30 minutes. So if you're using it to create some ambience around the hot tub, you don't have to worry if it gets knocked into the pool by accident. It's also dust-tight, so you don't have to worry about the inner tech getting messed up if you bring it to the beach.

The Beats Pill is a great sidekick for the beach or camping.   Credit: Matt Lighthart

The lanyard makes the Beats Pill easy to carry by hand.   Credit: Matt Lighthart

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Dislikes

The Beats Pill falls squarely in the mid-price range of our lineup. It's definitely not cheap, and we were disappointed by the lack of features like sound customization. We like to have the ability to tune our EQ to our own preferences and taste in music.

We also discovered that this speaker collects dents and dings much faster than the silicone- or fabric-coated models in our lineup. We (intentionally) dropped it a couple of times, and the hard plastic and metal casing did not make a nice sound when it hit the concrete. We didn't notice any major changes in the sound quality after this test, but we wouldn't want to push our luck. Unfortunately, the rounded shape rolls easily, and it fell off the table a few times unintentionally, so we could see this causing some problems in the future.

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If you like the sound as is, you might not miss the EQ adjustments, and if you're super careful, you might not even have any durability issues. The one thing you cannot escape is the annoying button controls. Everybody has to use the buttons.

In our opinion, there are not enough buttons to intuitively manage all the functions. Instead, you must memorize a series of clicks and double clicks to get to the feature you want, whether that's skipping a song or answering a call. Even the power button has multiple functions, and we often ended up putting into pairing or voice assist mode instead of turning the speaker off. Our final thought: This is not an earbud; we have button real estate - just make a few more buttons.

The volume is relatively loud for its size at 87.7 decibels. This is enough to compete with a blender or hairdryer, but we noticed some sharpness and compression at the upper volumes. Treble notes can sound especially fatiguing at high volumes. This was fine for dance music or rap where the bass is the star of the show, but it sounds a bit jarring when listening to softer classical or folk music.

Should You Buy the Beats Pill?

The Beats Pill isn't the best speaker out there, nor is it the best value. The sound isn't bad and can even be fun for dancing around the house, but it's not a great fit if you want to wind down later and listen to relaxing tunes. In the end, we feel it's a bit overpriced for what you get, or don't get, in terms of versatitlity. And it doesn't help that we have some durability concerns as well. The Beats brand has major curb appeal, but we think you are paying more for the name and sleek-looking design in this case. There are other speakers that really can do it all, for about the same price as the Pill.

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