Review: Beats Pill XL

Price: £269.95 (uk.beatsbydre.com)

Beats has been selling colourful, expensive portable speakers alongside its colourful, expensive headphones since 2012, and the Pill XL is the latest, largest and most pricey. But unlike most Beats products you can have a Pill XL in any colour you like, as long as it’s black.

It’s portable, but not very. The XL is over a foot long and weighs 1.4kg so you won’t carry it in a backpack on the off chance that you’ll need it. But it’s perfect for dragging along to a picnic, beach or barbecue.

Like Beats' headphones it’s solid and well put-together. The metal grille took a knock while I was using it and dented slightly, but no paint flaked off and the speakers themselves were well out of harm’s way.

Shaped, as the name suggests, like a pill, the back is scalloped to form a comfortable handle which also acts like a prop to stop it rolling away on flat surfaces. That handle also houses all but one of the controls, which are moulded into the case so as to keep out moisture, sand or dirt.

There are buttons for volume up/down, power, and a row of five small LEDs which act as a battery indicator. You also get a 3.5mm input and output socket, a firmware update point and a USB charging port – great for topping-up your phone from the XL’s comparatively cavernous battery. Beats claim 15 hours play-time and that seems about right as I charged my phone and played audio for several hours and lost just one LED of battery.

Two mysterious “buttons” near all of this are actually just recesses where an optional carry strap hooks in. Another circular “button” is actually just the NFC chip, which you can tap a compatible phone against to pair it quickly over Bluetooth - tap a friend’s Pill XL against yours and you can connect them together so that one acts as a left channel and one as a right.

All of this is hidden when the device is placed front-on, leaving a large Beats logo button as the only exposed control. Tapping it once will play/pause, while multiple taps will skip or rewind tracks – just like the button on a headphone cable.

Beats won’t reveal much about what’s inside, but it’s loud and characteristically bass-heavy. The XL will fill even a large garden with music easily, without distortion, and with a good deal of quality. The UK stages of the Tour de France happened to coincide with the time I was testing the XL, and I took to using it in my car for 500 miles of motorway driving as the stereo was so poor – Beats and Kraftwerk can create a dangerous amount of noise inside a small Citroën.

With a stylish design, comfortable handle, fantastic batter life and punchy, high-quality sound, the Pill XL is a fantastic product that could easily justify its admittedly high cost over a few summers of barbecues, trips to the beach and lazy days in the park.