Wednesday, September 4, 2013

Jawbone Unveils $179.99 Mini Jambox

Mini Jambox

Jawbone, the company behind the first major portable Bluetooth speaker, is taking its Jambox down a notch—in size that is.

The company on Wednesday introduced the Mini Jambox, a portable speaker that is about the same size as a can of Red Bull, and designed to amplify sound from your phone or the cloud wherever you are. The scaled-down speaker features "two neodymium drivers and a passive bass radiator" offering high-quality sound in a compact nine-ounce package which can "literally fit into your pocket," Jawbone said in a statement.

Priced at $179.99, the Mini Jambox is available for pre-order today on Jawbone's website and will be hitting major retailers nationwide later this month. It comes in nine different color options, including: red, silver, graphite, blue, aqua, purple, yellow, orange, and green.

The more compact version of Jawbone's Big Jambox £219.97 at Amazon Marketplace uses "advanced digital signal processing technology" for full-sound when listening to all types of audio content, including music, movies, games, and voice calls. It has a built-in rechargeable lithium-ion battery, which Jawbone said offers up to 10 hours of playback and 75 hours of standby time on a single charge.

"Mini Jambox goes with you literally everywhere and lets you take advantage of the spontaneous moments when you want to enjoy or share your entertainment, like streaming from Spotify on a road trip, showing friends a trending Vine clip at a party, or calling your family via Skype while honeymooning in Europe," Travis Bogard, vice president of product management and strategy at Jawbone, said in a statement.

The Mini is created from a single piece of extruded aluminum, which makes up both the framework and face of the speaker. Inside the aluminum case, there's an airtight enclosure, which "creates a maximally efficient acoustic cavity for producing sound," Jawbone said.

"Its unibody aluminum chassis is a complete redesign of our iconic Jambox and our most avant-garde speaker design yet, allowing us to pack even more sound and technology into a significantly smaller and more portable package," Yves Behar, chief creative officer for Jawbone, said.

Alongside the Mini, Jawbone today introduced a new app for iOS and Android that lets you customize the Mini Jambox and create playlists from iTunes, Spotify, and Rdio. The app lets you import your music libraries from these various services to access all your playlists in one place and easily switch back and forth between them.

The free Jawbone app is launching today in the App Store and on Google Play. At this point, playlist services are only available on iOS devices, and are "coming soon" to Android.