Braven shows off their BRV-1 portable wireless outdoor speakers at CES
The Braven BRV-1 (Brave One) is a portable speaker announced at CES that can be used with Bluetooth or a 1/8-inch headphone jack that allows you to take your music almost anywhere in any weather.
The speaker puts out three watts per channel for a total of 6W sound. The speaker contains a 1400mAh battery that can play for up to ten hours via Bluetooth, or presumably significantly longer using the 1/8-inch headphone jack. Both the battery capacity and watts per channel I was asked to update by a Braven representative, although their site lists what I wrote (5W,) for the wattageand 1200mAh for the battery.
The speakers are water resistant, and they were under a constant drizzle at CES. It does beg the question why you would want to stream to portable speakers sitting in the rain, and since the life of the speaker is ten hours, what they’re doing sitting in the rain all the time … but they work.
I guess if you have a rip-roaring party and forget to bring the speakers in and they got soaked, you’re set, but otherwise this feels like beautiful design overkill.
The BRV-1 also lists the ability to charge your cell phone from the built-in battery, although with only a 1400mAh battery built in, you’re probably not looking at much charging ability if you plan to use both the phone and the speaker. I didn’t see this demoed, so I can’t comment on it other than that 1400mAh is not a lot of juice for a cell phone.
Overall the design aesthetic reminds me of military hardware packaging, or higher end camera case design – not exactly speaker-esque, but then again, I don’t think these were the design cues they were aiming for.
The Braven BRV-1 has an MSRP of $169.99 and should be available February 2013.
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