Hot on the heels of the new Beats Solo 4 headphones and Solo Buds earbuds, eagle-eyed fans spotted F1 driver Daniel Ricciardo and basketball star LeBron James carrying what appears to be a brand new Beats Pill speaker. This has ignited speculation about a potential revival of the popular portable speaker line, discontinued in early 2022.

The original Beats Pill, launched in 2012, quickly gained a loyal following for its compact size, bold design, and surprisingly good sound quality. After Apple acquired Beats in 2014, they introduced the slightly larger Pill+ in 2015, addressing some sound quality concerns and adding a Lightning port for charging (likely to be replaced with USB-C in the new iteration).

These celebrity sightings with the new Pill come across as a calculated marketing strategy, similar to how the Beats Pill gained traction in the past. The new Beats Pill maintains the familiar pill-shaped design of its predecessors, measuring roughly 8 inches long and 2.5 inches wide. It retains the clean look with just the Beats logo adorning the front grille. A continuous rubberized strip separates the front and back speaker grilles, and rubber feet on the bottom keep it from rolling around.

For reference, the discontinued Pill+ earned praise for its significantly improved sound quality thanks to an internal redesign. It also sported a Lightning port for charging, which will likely be swapped for USB-C in this new iteration. The Pill+ offered a respectable battery life of 12 hours. While details remain scarce, the leaked images show a design that stays true to the classic Beats Pill silhouette. A lanyard attachment hints at portability remaining a key feature.

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Not everyone likes listening to music, but even those will perhaps begrudgingly agree that certain kinds of music can have different effects on one’s mood or mental state. Next to entertainment or the sheer joy of listening to favorite tunes, the most common use of music is to set the right mood, whether it’s to relax, to get pumped, or to be more productive. That said, musical tastes can be quite subjective, and even the kind of harmonies that you like could be affected by your mood at any given time. It can be quite taxing to change playlists or tracks every time, so rather than relying on your fingers and your own mind, why not let your phone do the work for you? This desk speaker concept does exactly that, analyzing your mood and picking the right music to help you finish your work, studies, or any other task you need to get done.

Designer: Junyoung Lee

People who love playing music while they work most likely have a library of tunes selected to help massage their grey matter, especially during slow hours. Unfortunately, the effectiveness of music can be thwarted by moods, emotions, and physical conditions. Sometimes we’re just stuck in a slump and manually picking out a more appropriate playlist only adds to the stress and traps you in a vicious mental cycle.

MIX:X is a smart speaker system that uses the power of your smartphone and machine learning to automate that process so you won’t have to lift a finger when your brain or heart is just too tired to care. You simply dock the phone in front of the tall, boxy speaker to start the process. The large camera at the bottom keeps a constant watch on the person’s face in front of it, particularly their facial expressions, and using computer vision, machine learning, and algorithms, it tries to identify the mood that the person is in. Depending on what mood that is, it will switch to a different playlist that will help get you into a more productive working state.

Part of the MIX:X speaker’s solution is actually not the device itself but the app that comes with it. Here you select the songs that you like and associate them with certain moods. The app’s AI analyzes the music selection and uses that as a pool to choose from when your mood shifts one way or another. It doesn’t simply get music out of thin air (or the Internet), giving you some amount of control to limit the choices to your preferences.

In that sense, the MIX:X speaker is simply a box with speakers facing sideways and a camera, though it definitely has an interesting aesthetic. It has transparent panels for its sides and back, putting the sophisticated electronics inside on display. The rest of the device’s design is pretty minimal, with a single dial for the volume. If there’s one glaring flaw in its design, it’s the fact that it seems to support only a specific model or size of a specific phone, namely an iPhone, which severely limits how much this concept can be used outside of that single device.

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Portable wireless speakers are becoming quite ubiquitous these days as a way to enjoy your favorite music anywhere you are, whether you’re outside or just in another room. In exchange for their portability, however, the quality of the sound these speakers produce is less impressive compared to bigger and more stationary equipment found at home. It would be nice if you could have the best of both worlds, enjoying an audio system that follows you around the house without missing a beat. You could try to buy multiple wireless speakers and hope they can be connected to each other, or you can hope that this peculiar speaker system concept becomes a reality, allowing you to pick up one or two speakers from their base as easily as you would pick up your takeout meal.

Designers: Junwoo Kim, Yoonjeong Lee, Heeyeol Yang, Jaehoon Jeong

For an audio experience to be considered truly immersive, it has to sound like it’s coming from all around you. More specifically, the right sounds have to come from the correct direction rather than equally from all directions. Making this possible with a single speaker or even a pair of headphones is possible but difficult to accomplish, requiring sophisticated algorithms and precise control to create the illusion of surround sound. Of course, you could set up a surround sound system in your entertainment den, but then that magic only takes effect in that room.

TakeOut is an LG-inspired concept for a modular speaker system that lets you design your own audio space in a snap. At its core is a 360-degree soundbar that tries to bring the sound to you wherever you are in the room by blasting it in all directions. But when you push down on one of the circles on the top of the soundbar, a short cylindrical wireless speaker pops up. It’s not a completely independent speaker and it works in tandem with the soundbar, but its most important feature is that you can take it anywhere with you in the house.

This portability means that you can set up your audio experience just the way you want it, whether you’re listening in the same room or elsewhere. Need to go to your home office for a while? Just pop out one of the speakers and let the music follow you there. You can also create your surround sound setup in a flash by positioning the four “sub-speakers” around the room, though that doesn’t necessarily mean that the system will know which sound needs to come from which speaker.

While the design of TakeOut is quite interesting, there might be some practical issues with it as well. For one, the concept doesn’t clarify if the individual speakers can be used separately from the soundbar or if they’re completely dependent on it. If it’s the latter, it also means that the speakers won’t function properly if they ever go out of range of the soundbar or if the data can’t reach them because of obstacles like walls. Those details, however, could actually be ironed out with some features that don’t take away anything from the spirit of this modular and immersive audio system.

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Many people these days dream about living on other planets or at least inside orbiting space stations, but few actually consider how very different life would be outside the Earth’s gravity. Of course, Hollywood tends to romanticize a lot of everyday life, but as astronauts will testify, living in space, even if just to reach the Moon or Mars, is no walk in the park. Even the simplest activities like drinking water can be awkward and disorienting in zero-g, at least if you consider using Earth-bound objects to do so. That’s why this trio of designs tries to reimagine some of the most mundane products we use in daily life and transform them into objects that are ready for our space-faring future.

Designers: Subin Kim, Jagyeong Baek, Jaeyeon Lee

Most of us understand that without gravity, things tend not to stay down, but few actually envision the ramifications of that fact. Products designed on Earth naturally presume an amount of stability, and the way they are handled or controlled is limited in the same manner. For example, a lot of everyday things only have handles on one side or work in a single direction, a presumption that doesn’t make much sense or even becomes counterproductive when the objects are floating in space.

Spatio is a collection of these everyday objects that have been redesigned with zero gravity in mind. Or to put it more simply, it doesn’t make presumptions on where and how it will function, making it work both on Earth, on Mars, or in the International Space Station. Aqua, for example, is a water bottle that replaces a traditional cup that has a single handle on one side only. In contrast, this bottle has four extrusions in cardinal directions that act as handles and a cover that lets you drink by sucking rather than sipping from the lip of a mug.

Sonus is a wireless speaker that really defies the traditional design of speakers. Inspired by the moon’s spherical shape, each of the “craters” on its surface pops up a tiny omnidirectional speaker when pressed. The more units that pop out, the louder it gets, acting is an unconventional form of volume control. The important difference is that you don’t have to shift or move the speaker to one side or the other just to reach those controls.

And then there’s Lumia, a star-shaped flashlight that can shine in any direction. Simply turning the central wheel switches the direction of the light so that it works regardless of how you’re holding it. While these products were designed with space living in mind, it’s not difficult to imagine them working just as well on Terra Firma, proving that truly accessible design benefits everyone everywhere, even if they’re living in outer space.

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There are parents who would like to wean their children every once in a while from screens because they believe that it may be rotting their brain or something. But even these parents will sometimes have to admit that they still need technology to manage their children’s lives or to teach them things like productivity and time management. So product developers are coming up with non-screen devices to help parents and kids navigate life.

Designer: Pupupula

The Little House Alarm Clock is one such device that has a pretty basic display but still utilizes technology to help children manage their time and schedule properly. It’s basically a smart speaker with a built-in intelligent voice assistant to help the kids (and maybe adults) out. The display will only show the time, date, temperature, humidity, as well as the time of the next alarm set, which means the next upcoming schedule.

The design is that of a tiny house that should look at home whether in the kid’s room or in your living room. It has a light source but it is underneath the outer shell to give off a softer look to its orange nightlight. There are only two buttons to make it simple: a red chimney and a blue mute button. They complement the minimalist design with its white body color. You can also adjust the backlight for the screen by pressing the chimney or through the app.

The alarm clock has four different customized nature themed alarm sounds that match the animation that will show up on the display. There is also a Sleep Mode which will dim the lights and will turn off the mic so that everyone can really rest. The voice assistant when active can set reminders, play music, tell stories, and other tasks that don’t need a screen for your kids. It seems like an interesting device to have if you still want technology to help you out but not necessarily your smartphone or tablet.

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