The new Beats Pill is a fantastic speaker with a questionable control scheme

The new Beats Pill Speaker is the best Bluetooth speaker Apple has ever made. It sounds crisp and the soundstage that comes out of its small frame is nothing to scoff at. Combine that with much needed improvements like waterproofing and multi-day battery life, and this Pill is not only improving on the older Pill and Pill+, but it’s also finally making a play to be the best Bluetooth speaker on the market, bar none.

That’s not to say it’s perfect, though. There are too many features packed inside this little speaker for all its buttons to handle, so it’s more confusing than I’d like. That said, for its $199 price point, the new Pill beats out most of its class.

Great first impressions

Out of the box, the new Pill is sleek and smaller than I expected. It’s still pretty close to the same size as a standard UE Boom 3, but since it sits horizontally, it feels a little smaller. It also feels great in the hand with a soft-touch silicon wrapping around most of the device. It also fits into my hand really nicely. The grill on the front is metal and feels tough enough not to crack off dropped. My review unit is the Black model, but you could also get one in the fun Gold Champagne colour or classic Beats Statement Red. From what I’ve seen in the marketing materials the Champagne Gold option is the most modern looking, but I’m sure most people will end up with the non-descript black option.

The most surprising part of the speaker is actually how fun it sounds. Like many other Beats products, the sound profile you get from the new Pill is incredibly bass-forward. This brings a nice punch to a lot of music, but I’ve found as you get above 50-70 percent volume, it kicks really hard. My first reaction was, “This is awesome.” But after using it for a few more hours, I found the speaker a little overbearing for songs that already push the bass high. Balanced rock and roll songs or something classical sounded better, with nice but noticeable bass hits for such a small speaker. For example, something like ‘Boys in the Better Land’ by Fontaines D.C. played really nicely with the new Pill, but ‘Liquor Store’ by Remi Wolf, a newer rap/pop song, pushes the bass so high that it overshadows other elements of the track.

Overall, I really like this speaker’s sound profile and when you combine that with its portability and battery life, it’s hard to beat.

You can hear a great example of this overshadowing effect by listening to ‘Confessions, Pt. III’ by Toronto’s own BADBADNOTGOOD. This song is an instrumental saxophone-based track, but on the Pill the bass overshadows the sax every once in a while. It should feel more even with the sax front and centre. At the end of the day, this comes down to personal preference, and I’m pretty split on it. Sometimes, I find it to be a tad distracting when I’m sitting and listening to music at my desk. Other times, it fills a room with sound, and the punch of the bass just makes me want to dance. Either way, after a prolonged listening session, I found myself able to get lost in the music really easily, so I think most people will enjoy this speaker. Just be warned if you hate when the bass EQ is pushed up a  new notches.

The reason the new Pill is so bass-heavy is because Apple has re-engineered it with a larger woofer. Most speaker devices actually use two speaker units to produce a wide range of sounds. The ‘woofer’ handles the low-end frequencies like bass, while the ‘tweeter’ handles everything else. Other speakers in this size range might use two tweeters or a passive radiator to help even out lower-end frequencies, so adding the woofer can produce a wider soundstage. This is definitely true with the new Pill, but as I mentioned above, the bass can feel a little hot. That said, it has a powerful room-filling sound, and the larger the space and the further you are from it, the more balanced the bass feels.

Other features

Beats has also packed the new Pill with a ton of cool software features and other improvements outside of the realm of sound quality.

The upgrades that make me happy are the 24-hour battery life with the ability to quick charge. The press info states that 10-minutes on the charger should result in around two hours of music playback. You can also use the speaker as a portable battery if your phone dies before the Pill does.

Combine that with the new fabric handle and the IP67 water/dustproof rating, and this little speaker is ready to go on any weekend adventure you throw at it. Plus, if you have two, you can connect them together for ‘Amplify mode.’ This mode is for setting up a defacto multi-room audio setup at a party. Both speakers will output mono sound together, letting you play music in multiple places at once. If you’re having a smaller get-together or want to listen to music in stereo, you can enable ‘Stereo mode,’ which assigns the left and right channels to each speaker for a more immersive listening experience.

To sweeten the deal, the speaker can also plug into your phone and play lossless audio and work as a portable battery. Smaller devices like a phone or wireless earbuds will automatically get charged. Larger devices like laptops and tablets will use logic to determine if the speaker should charge off them or if it should act as a battery. You can also triple-tap the power button to reverse the charging direction. This is really handy, and something I’ve used on my Sonos Move many times.

One of my main points of contention with the new Pill is how few buttons it has for its plethora of controls. For instance, the power button has six different functions.

• Power on/off (hold for more than 0.8 seconds, but less than three)
• Pairing (press and hold for over three seconds)
• Voice Assistant (double tap)
• Battery status (quick tap, less than 0.8 seconds)
• Change charging direction (triple tap)
• USB-C audio pass through (press and hold button while plugging in USB-C cable)

This is way too much for one button. I’m even a huge nerd who’s studied these controls, and written them down in this article, and I know I’m going to forget. Even over the two days I’ve been testing the speaker, I’ve found it really annoying to turn on/off, and I’ve accidentally set it into pairing mode many times. Sonos had this same problem on its Sonos Roam from 2021 and it recently updated that speaker to add a dedicated pairing button.

That’s not all, either. There’s a button in the middle of the speaker that works similarly to buttons on most headphones/earbuds, but more complex.

• Play/pause (tap once)
• Skip forwards (tap twice)
• Skip backwards (tap three times)
• Enter Amplify mode (press and hold the middle button on two Pills at once)
• Enter Stereo mode (press and hold the centre button and volume up after pairing in Amplify mode)
• Break apart speaker group (Press and hold centre button and volume down)

Again, this is too many controls for one button. I would forgive this if there was some sort of app we could use to enable all these settings without a cheat sheet handy, but there’s no real app for the new Pill.  There is a version of the Beats app on Android, but it only allows you to tweak some button commands, like muting yourself during a call. You can also change the name of the speaker and add the speaker to the Android Find My Device network. On iOS, these features appear in the Settings app like AirPods. There is nowhere in the speaker settings page to adjust the EQ.

I would love to see more buttons added to a future Pill for pairing and for Amplify/Stereo modes. Hiding these cooler (yet admittedly niche) features behind a cryptic button combo is too complicated for most people to even remember, and too finicky for nerds to even want to enable them.

Almost the perfect Bluetooth speaker

At the end of the day, there’s a lot to love about the new Pill – it sounds great, the battery life is stellar and it has a lot of niche features for people looking to get the most out of their purchase. Which is why it’s so weird that there is no app for easy control of the extra features. Hiding everything behind complex button presses is not a great way to make an accessible speaker. Even turning it on and off requires more thought and timing than it should.

It’s also worth pointing out that the physical manual the speaker comes with is pitiful. It’s a tiny piece of folded paper with a QR code on the outside. When you unfold it, there are a few quick controls laid out, but it doesn’t even mention how to turn the speaker off, which as I found out, is more complex than it needs to be.

The other major thing holding me personally back from the Beats Pill is the fact that it doesn’t float. This is a small thing, but I spend a lot of time camping and canoeing in the summers, so I really like the UE Boom 3 and Wonder Boom 3 since they both float if you accidentally drop them in water. This is really handy when you’re in deep water like a lake. The Pill would be fine for most scenarios since it can take a few splashes, but the peace of mind knowing that if my boat flips, I won’t lose my speaker has always been reassuring to me.

At the end of the day, this is a really great Bluetooth speaker, and if you’re the type of person that usually cranks up the bass when you get control of the EQ, this speaker is for you.

The Beats Pill is $199 in Canada.