Sonos has announced the Move 2, which is the successor to what was the company's first Bluetooth speaker. The original Sonos Move was a brilliant speaker - still is, in fact. It offered excellent sound, a great design with an integrated handle, IP56 water and dust resistance and a battery life that lasted around 11 hours. It was the perfect living room-to-garden speaker when it arrived in 2019.
The Move 2 takes all of what was great about the first Move and improves on many areas. First up, the acoustic architecture has been redesigned in the Move 2 compared to the Move, similar to what Sonos did with the Era 100 compared to the One. The company has introduced a secondary tweeter to allow for stereo sound, while a custom-engineered woofer is designed to deliver the bass many have come to expect from Sonos speakers. There are also custom waveguides within the Move 2 - another feature many of the newer Sonos speakers offer - to control the direction and dispersion of frequencies for what should be a more balanced soundstage.
When it comes to the design, the Sonos Move 2 makes a move towards sustainability (see what we did there?). Like the Era 100 and Era 300, the Move 2 reduces its idle energy consumption. Compared to the original Move, the Move 2 uses 40 per cent less energy when on standby and not in use, and its packaging is more sustainable too. That's not all though, there's a replaceable battery too.
Elsewhere, the Sonos Move 2 brings in the new controls that were first introduced on Era 100 and Era 300 earlier this year. The controls see a volume trough through the centre of the top, along with play/pause, forward and rewind capacitive buttons. There is also a microphone mute button, but you'll find a hardware switch on the back of Move 2 to turn off the microphones too, along with USB-C line-in.
Speaking of microphones, these enable Automatic Trueplay tuning on the Move 2 so wherever you move it to, the sound will adjust in accordance with the environment, like Move also offers. There's also Alexa on board and Sonos Voice Control but no Google Assistant this time. All other Sonos features are on board though, and there's automatic switching between Bluetooth and Wi-Fi too, so you shouldn't miss a beat.
The Sonos Move 2 comes in the traditional Black and White colour options offered by all Sonos speakers in the company's portfolio, but there is an additional Olive colour too. The only other speaker available in colours other than black and white is the Sonos Roam and these launched later so it's great to see a colour on the initial release.
Last thing to mention - and it's a biggie - is the battery life of the Move 2 is claimed to be 24 hours. This is over double what the original Move delivered so you can take this speaker outside and keep the tunes pumping all day and all night. The only problem is, the price has increased with all these improvements.
The Sonos Move 2 will go on sale on 20 September and it will cost $449 in the US, £449 in the UK and €499 in Europe, which is the same as the Era 300 that has Dolby Atmos and Spatial Audio, as well as Bluetooth, though no portability.