Bang and Olufsen’s first Bluetooth 5.2 speaker has 27 hours of battery life

Bang and Olufsen’s latest Bluetooth speaker is the Beosound Explore, a $199 (£169) speaker that’s rated to run for 27 hours “at typical listening volumes” before needing a charge.

That’s an impressive amount of battery life for a small (roughly 5 x 3 x 3 inch) Bluetooth speaker like this. For comparison, JBL’s slightly larger Charge 5 speaker goes for 20 hours, while even the much larger UE Hyperboom tops out at 24 hours.

Bang and Olufsen tells me that the Beosound Explore’s battery life is thanks to a couple of things. It’s one of the first speakers to support the new Bluetooth 5.2 standard, which offers a more power efficient way to receive audio from your devices. This combines with the Explore’s innards, which are tuned with power efficiency in mind. It means the speaker should get a lot of playback out of its modest 2,400 mAh battery.

Image: Bang and Olufsen

Beyond its battery life, the Beosound Explore offers a more typical range of features for a Bluetooth speaker. It’s IP67 water resistant, so it should survive being briefly submerged, it supports being paired in stereo if you have two Explores, and in supports Apple, Google, and Microsoft’s fast pairing standards. Charging is handled over USB-C and takes around two hours, the company says.

The Beosound Explore is available from today in black and green, with a gray model following this summer.