Nokia And JBL Announce New Portable NFC Speakers For Lumia

Today Nokia announced that it has teamed up with JBL to introduce a new line of speakers meant to be paired with the Lumia. The full name of this new line is called "JBL PlayUp Portable Wireless Speaker for Nokia," and they appear to be real attention-getters. In a post on Conversations with Nokia, the company's Ian Delaney went through what we can expect from these PlayUp speakers, starting right off with the eye catching color and the similarities users are bound to see between these and the Play 360° speakers Nokia began offering last year.

The PlayUp speakers certainly are reminiscent of the Play 360° speaker, but we're thinking that the color has more to do with that than anything else. As you can see in the image above, the speakers come in four colors – cyan, black, white and bright yellow. On the outside, we've got "specially created double-shot plastic" which makes for a more durable speaker, and though we don't get many specifics about the speaker's innards, Nokia says that this bad boy is capable of a maximum output of 89dB. In other words, this tiny thing (its dimensions are 118 x 118 x 128mm and it weighs 760g) can get pretty loud.

You've got a pretty big range when it comes to frequency response, which comes in at 85Hz – 22kHz (-6dB). Users can connect their phones through Bluetooth or, in the case of next-generation Lumias running Windows Phone 8, through NFC. Of course, Nokia isn't about to leave anyone out in the cold, so if you've got a phone that doesn't have Bluetooth or NFC, you can connect your device to the speaker through a 3.5mm jack. To top things off, we're told that the battery lasts for 10 hours before needing a recharge.

There isn't a solid release date for the PlayUp speakers yet, but Nokia says that they'll begin shipping "before the end of the year." While we don't know the release date, we do know the price – picking up one of these will set you back €149, which is around $187. The PlayUp speaker is only the first product of Nokia's partnership with JBL, and we're told that more is on the way in the future. Stay tuned.