Sony’s Reon Pocket Pro Plus brings colder neck cooling to the UK and Europe, pushing the wearable cooler a little further down the road from ”odd gadget” to ”actually engineered.” The device sits under a shirt at the base of the neck, where it uses the Peltier effect to cool the skin directly rather than pretending a tiny fan can beat summer like a personal weather system.
The upgrade is mostly about doing the same trick better. Sony says the Reon Pocket Pro Plus delivers a 2-degree Celsius increase in cooling, a 20 percent gain, while a revised algorithm tracks temperature changes on the device and around it more accurately. It also keeps going for up to 10 hours on its second-highest setting, which is the sort of battery life that makes a wearable cooler sound less like a novelty and more like a commuter accessory.
What Sony changed in the Reon Pocket Pro Plus
The hardware is familiar, but not untouched. New fins are designed to make the unit 40 percent more stable on your neck and shoulders, and the fin around the vent is meant to fit a wider range of neck shapes. Sony also says the smaller second-generation Pocket Tag now monitors ambient temperature and humidity, feeding more data into the cooling system and companion app.
That matters because wearable cooling has always had a problem: it is only useful if it stays in place and reacts fast enough to your environment. Sony’s pitch is that the Reon Pocket Pro Plus is better at both, while still preserving the quiet fan and automatic shutdown protection that keep the whole thing from becoming a warm cautionary tale.
Reon Pocket Pro Plus price and availability
The Reon Pocket Pro Plus is priced at £199 in the UK and €220 elsewhere in Europe. Sony has not said when or if it will launch in the US, which is a familiar move for niche hardware that starts life in Asia and then slowly works its way westward once the company is convinced people will pay for comfort on demand.
- Cooling boost: 2 degrees Celsius, or 20 percent
- Battery life: up to 10 hours on the second-highest setting
- Stability: 40 percent more stable, according to Sony
- Price: £199 in the UK, €220 elsewhere in Europe
The real test is whether people wear it outside
Sony has spent nearly a decade refining Reon, which says a lot about how stubborn the idea is: if enough people are willing to clip a cooling puck under their clothes, there is a market there. The bigger question is whether this lands as an elegant heatwave fix or another gadget people admire, buy once, and then leave in a drawer next to the portable fan and the optimistic water bottle.