There is a particular kind of gadget that ends up in a drawer. Spare chargers, the old pair of earphones, and almost always, the Bluetooth speaker you bought for one trip and never took out again. Most portable speakers seem designed with that fate in mind. Grey, rubbery, anonymous. The Beats Pill I have been living with for the last two months is the opposite. It is bright red, it sits out in the open in my bedroom, and walking in, it is the first thing your eye goes to.
That is worth saying up front, because it shapes everything else about this speaker. The Pill is not new. Beats revived the name in June 2024, nearly a decade after the Pill+, and Apple brought it to India that September at ₹16,900. That is still the official price. So the question in 2026 is not whether it is exciting. It is whether it has aged well against a crop of newer rivals. Two months in, my answer is yes, with a few clear caveats.
Design and Build
My unit is in what Beats calls Statement Red, and it is the reason I would pick this colour over the Matte Black or Champagne Gold. It is a deep, saturated shade that makes the Pill read as a design object first and an audio device second. In my bedroom, it works as an accent piece, which is not something I have ever said about a speaker. The familiar capsule shape helps, as does the large b logo on the grille, which will look iconic or slightly loud depending on how you feel about the brand.
The build backs up the looks. At roughly 680g, it has a dense, reassuring weight when you pick it up, and the soft-touch shell and grille are tightly put together with no creaks or flex anywhere. It feels like something that will survive years of being moved around, and two months of regular use have given me no reason to think otherwise. The IP67 rating covers dust and submersion in up to a metre of water on paper, though the Pill does not float, so keep it away from the deep end at a pool party. A colour-matched lanyard comes attached for hanging it off a bag.
The three buttons on top handle power, playback and volume. They have a soft, squishy travel rather than a defined click. Some will like that. I would have preferred a clearer response when reaching for them without looking.
How it sounds
Inside is a single racetrack-shaped woofer and a tweeter, angled upward so the sound is aimed at you rather than across the table. That also means this is a mono speaker. There is no stereo separation from a single unit.
The tuning leans on bass, and I went in expecting the usual. A lot of bass-first speakers in this price band deliver a single, blunt thud that swallows everything underneath the vocals. The kick drum, the bassline and the low end of a guitar all merge into one boom. The Pill does not do that. Its bass is prominent, but it has shape. Notes start and stop cleanly, you can actually follow a bassline rather than just feel it, and it does not smear into the rest of the mix. That clean low end is the single best thing about how this speaker sounds.
It is not flawless. Independent measurements show the midrange sitting a step behind the bass and treble, and several reviewers have noted the sound hardening at the very top of the volume range. The Beats app offers no EQ, so the bass-forward tuning is what you live with. Beats markets the Pill as “seriously loud”. It is loud for its size and more than enough for a room, but this is a speaker for a bedroom, a balcony or a small group. It is not a party speaker.
The more interesting trick is the USB-C port. Plug the Pill into a laptop or phone and it plays lossless audio at up to 24-bit/48kHz, which makes it a genuinely useful desk speaker. Over Bluetooth, codec support is limited to SBC and AAC, so Android users do not get LDAC or aptX. On a single-driver speaker this size, that matters less than the spec sheet suggests. If you want stereo, a second Pill can be paired for left and right channels, though that doubles an already significant outlay.
One speaker, two ecosystems
This is where the Pill quietly does something unusual for an Apple-owned product. It treats Android as an equal. Bring it near an iPhone and a pairing card pops up. Bring it near an Android phone and Google Fast Pair does the same. Both platforms get tracking, through Apple Find My and Google Find My Device respectively. Android users get the Beats app for settings and firmware, while on an iPhone those controls live inside iOS itself. Moving between phones has been completely painless, and in a home where both platforms coexist, that is worth more than any single spec.
There are catches. Multipoint, which keeps the speaker connected to two devices at once, only works with Android. There is no 3.5mm aux input either. The built-in microphone doubles as a speakerphone, and the USB-C port can top up your phone in a pinch, albeit slowly.
Battery
Beats rates the Pill at 24 hours of playback at half volume, a figure independent tests have broadly backed up, and ten minutes on the charger buys roughly two hours. In practice, charging it is something you do occasionally rather than something you plan around.
The Verdict on the Beats Pill
At ₹16,900, the Beats Pill goes up against the likes of the JBL Flip, the Bose SoundLink Flex and Sony’s portable range. It is not the loudest of them, it gives you no control over the sound, and a single unit cannot do stereo. What it does is look better than all of them, feel built to last, deliver bass that is clean rather than bloated, and work equally well with whatever phone is in your pocket.
Mine is staying out on display. For a Bluetooth speaker, that is the highest compliment I can pay.
