Sony unveils upgraded Reon Pocket Pro Plus wearable air conditioner

Sony has returned to one of its most unusual consumer products with a new version of its wearable personal air conditioner, the Reon Pocket Pro Plus, building on a line that began as an experimental idea and is now being pushed across multiple regions. The upgrade is not a full redesign, but Sony says it adds performance improvements to last year’s Pro model as summer heat pushes more buyers to look for portable ways to cool the body rather than the room.

The product’s roots go back to 2017, when Sony camera engineer Kenji Itoh came up with the concept during a business trip to Shanghai, where outdoor heat and aggressively air-conditioned interiors made the temperature contrast hard to ignore. Sony later moved the project through its new-business program, now the Sony Acceleration Platform, and first brought the original REON POCKET to general sale on July 1, 2020. That debut followed a crowdfunding campaign on First Flight that reached 66 million yen in about a week. The first model was designed to sit in a special undershirt pocket and cool or warm the skin through the neck area, with four cooling levels, four warming levels and a weight of about 89 grams.

Sony has kept refining the concept for a broader market. In a 2025 corporate blog post, the company said REON POCKET had sold out every year and that Sony Thermo Technology Inc. was launched in 2023 and spun off from Sony in 2024. The same post said Sony planned to expand the business into 22 countries and regions. The REON POCKET PRO was positioned partly for overseas and corporate users, especially in markets where larger devices, stronger cooling, longer battery life and one-button operation are favored.

That strategy hints at both the promise and the limit of wearable cooling. Sony said the Pro sold about 15,000 units in roughly two days after its Japan launch, a sign of clear demand among early adopters. But the product line still reads like a premium solution for a narrow use case: people who spend long stretches outdoors, commute in punishing heat or work in settings where a jacket or uniform makes air conditioning less effective. Sony’s support portal now lists availability across Asia, the Middle East, Europe and Oceania, including Japan, the United Kingdom, the United Arab Emirates, Singapore, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Korea, Malaysia, Thailand, Vietnam, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Kuwait, Bahrain, Austria, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, Switzerland and Australia. That reach suggests ambition. It does not yet make wearable cooling a mass-market answer to hotter summers.