American basketball star LeBron James has long been part of Beats history, during which time he has also been known to leak upcoming products – and it looks like he’s done it again. The NBA legend was captured wearing what appears to be a brand new and unreleased Bluetooth speaker on a reel Instagram (see below) by the LA Lakers. In it you can clearly see that the pill-shaped speaker has a Beats logo – and that it is attached to a cord, something that the most recent Beats Pill speaker did not have.
The Beats Pill Plus was withdrawn from the market in January 2022, but wouldn’t qualify as one of the best Bluetooth speakers if it were still sold today. It dated back to the time Apple acquired Beats – it was the first Beats speaker to come with a Lightning port, Apple’s connector of choice at the time – and was considered too expensive by many at its launch in 2015, let alone years later when Apple finally stopped selling them.
What we’d like to see in a new Beats Pill speaker
The Beats Pill Plus had a decent 12 hours of battery life, but modern models do much better. One of our current picks, the Tribit Stormbox Flow, is good for 30 hours. But that’s not the biggest part of the Beats speaker we’d expect to see upgraded. The Bluetooth of 2015 wasn’t a patch on the Bluetooth of today, and the best speakers now deliver vastly improved sound quality through the use of newer, better codecs.
One of the best illustrations of how Bluetooth speakers have changed is when you compare our current favorite, the Sonos Roam, to the most recent Beats. The price is the same because Sonos is another premium brand. But it has up-to-date Bluetooth, Wi-Fi for even better streaming, multi-room audio support, Google Assistant and Alexa. It automatically switches between Bluetooth and Wi-Fi, has automatic room tuning and sounds fantastic.
And that’s a model that’s about to be replaced: we expect to see the Sonos Roam 2 this summer with even better Bluetooth and improved voice control. That’ll probably arrive in June – so if a new Beats wants to be a Sonos killer, it’ll have to be something as awe-inspiring as the legend currently wearing it. We’ll find out soon enough, because if this is indeed a bit of celebrity product placement, the actual product launch may not be far away.