B&O Play today announced the Beoplay P2, its brand new portable Bluetooth speaker, and invited us along to have a drink and a chat with them to celebrate.
The Beoplay P2 is B&O Play’s smallest ever portable speaker and takes its design inspiration from a smooth pebble thats pleasant to the touch. The diminutive size makes it a perfect travel companion, and the company says there’s no excuse to leave your music experience behind when you travel.
The gorgeous anodised aluminium grill covers the entire surface of the speaker, a simple design that eschews buttons entirely for controls. Instead, the P2 embraces touch controls on its surface, allowing you to double tap it to play/pause and shake it to skip a track. It’ll last 10 hours on a single charge, and it charges from a built in USB-C connector for the fastest possible charging experience.
B&O Play’s engineers took learnings from last year’s Beoplay A1 when looking to define the P2’s high quality audio reproduction. Despite this effort, they know that music is a personal experience and so you can use an iOS or Android app to tweak the company’s out-of-the-box settings and make your music experience your own.
The P2 also packs a couple of neat multifunction tricks into its tiny form, with an alarm clock function set by the companion app on your phone, and it’s also got a microphone on board so it can be used for hands-free conference calling.
Despite the party atmosphere, a few of the attendees managed to pair our phones to the P2 speakers lying around (there were quite a few of them!) and set about playing their own music to test out the speakers’ capabilities. While I was happy with a quick Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 2 soundtrack test, it was good to hear some of the other units pump out some serious bass, rivalling some of the best we’ve heard in portable Bluetooth audio yet.
I found the P2 comfortable to hold in the hand, with a suitable heft for a speaker that’s a little larger than a smartphone. The aluminium finish comes in three colours – Royal Blue, Sand Stone and Black, and the soft touch rubberised base keeps the speaker stable on any flat surface. Its size and shape makes it easy to carry with you in a bag or even in your pocket.
The Beosound P2 is available for $249 at JB Hifi, Harvey Norman, Bang & Olufsen and Apple stores and other retailers from April 27.
