For the past two years, the Ultimate Ears BOOM has been, in my opinion, the benchmark Bluetooth speaker. It was the first one to come out that really and truly changed the way I personally thought about BT speakers, because it was the first one that didn't sound like a tiny, ultra-portable speaker. Since then, we've seen a lot of really nice speakers step the game up, but despite being two years old, the BOOM has been able to hold its own against basically all of them.

Today, UE announced the successor to the BOOM, the BOOM 2. Naturally, this builds on what UE started with the BOOM and makes it better. The BOOM 2 is 25 percent louder than its predecessor, and it also features intuitive track controls right on the speaker (without adding any additional buttons), which is something that I've personally wanted on UE's speakers for as long as I've been using them. The lack of track controls was literally the only weak link I could find on the BOOM, MEGABOOM, and ROLL, and now that's fixed on the BOOM 2.

Aside from that, the BOOM 2 also increases the playback distance to 100 feet and ups the battery life to 15 hours, all without increasing the size. In fact, the BOOM 2 is the same size as the original, and it keeps the same familiar look.

The BOOM 2 will be released sometime this month (no exact date yet) for $199 and will come in six new colors: Cherrybomb, Yeti, Phantom, GreenMachine, Tropical, and BrainFreeze.

PRESS RELEASE