The 487,000th time I caught myself cupping my hand underneath my phone’s speaker so my friends could hear a YouTube video, I finally came to grips with the idea that the speakers on my phone, my tablet, and my laptop are an affront to the music I listen to every day. So I set out to buy a Bluetooth speaker, one that would connect to any device in any place and make for beautiful music whether I’m at home, on the beach, or stuck in the office trying to show someone the latest OK Go insanity.
The perfect portable Bluetooth speaker is a fairly simple idea. It’s easy to connect and has good range, never dropping its connection as I move around the room or around my house. It looks good, and it’s at least portable enough to go in my backpack when I go to the beach. Its battery lasts at least as long as your average barbecue. It works as a speakerphone, in a pinch. It has some nifty extra features, like the ability to chain a few together or connect multiple phones at once. And most importantly, it sounds good whether I’m listening to Yo-Yo Ma or the Ying Yang Twins.
Most of the time, you’re making tradeoffs with anything you buy. But with portable Bluetooth speakers, there’s one option that does it all.
THE WINNER
LOGITECH UE BOOM
Logitech didn’t invent the Bluetooth speaker category, but it owns it. The UE Boom is essentially flawless: it’s a tall, water-resistant cylindrical speaker that fires sound in every direction. It sounds great, with more bass response and more resonant mids than I’d expect from a speaker either this size or this price. The sound is clear and powerful, and gets plenty loud to throw a dance party.
The Boom comes in a bunch of good-looking color combinations, and if you buy a couple of them you can pair two together and turn them into proper stereo speakers. There’s a companion app that lets you control equalizer settings and more, but you can also just ignore the app and connect the Boom like any other Bluetooth speaker. It only takes one button press and a few seconds to set it up, and its range extends up to about 35 feet — that’s standard for Bluetooth.
Even at loud volumes, the Boom will last much longer than your party. It lasted more than 16 hours of continuous playback before it died, and used more sparingly shouldn’t need to be charged very often at all. And when you do need to charge, it takes a simple Micro USB cable to get it back up and running.
The UE Boom is on the larger side of Bluetooth speakers, but it’s still plenty portable. And it’s everything I want it to be: good-sounding, long-lasting, with plenty of extras, and it’s good-looking to boot. If you want the best all-around option you can buy, it’s really not even close.
THE RUNNER UP
SOL REPUBLIC DECK
It doesn’t sound quite as good as the UE Boom, but Sol Republic’s Deck has an insane set of features no other Bluetooth speaker can touch. First, there’s the range: I walked 200 feet or more from the speaker, and music kept playing without a hitch. Then there’s battery: the Deck played continuously for 22.5 hours, longer by a wide margin than anything else I tested. (Sol lists the battery life at 10 hours). And the features: it has a neat Heist mode that lets you pair up to five different devices, so you can all DJ together.
The Deck looks like a strange, alien carrying case of some kind; it’s wide and short, designed to be used on a flat surface of some kind. It comes in a handful of cool colors, too (it was originally designed to be sold with the also-colorful Moto X). It’s a little lighter than the UE Boom, but effectively just as portable.
I like everything about this device, except that the sound just isn’t quite there: there’s some bass response but not as much as I’d like, and you can hear the compression in any kind of dynamic music. With the Boost mode on, you can certainly hear it from across the room, but that mode just makes vocals really loud at the expense of everything else. Ultimately, none of the Deck’s nifty extras make up the difference in sound between it and the UE Boom — but you certainly can’t go wrong this way either.
