Before my final Freshers' Week commenced I was offered a product to play with that'd certainly be well used during the week of non-stop fun, this being the wireless UE Boom speaker.
I knew instantly that this product would be perfect for our predrinks in our student house, and was kindly sent it in time for the first event of Freshers', the Icebreaker Disco. The only issue I had with the product was the fact that I had to wait for my housemates to return before I could test it out, faced by the unfortunate hurdle of owning absolutely no bluetooth compatible devices. I wouldn't consider this a flaw though and it certainly won't affect my opinion of the product, because of course if you didn't have any bluetooth compatible devices, you wouldn't buy it in the first place!
The Ultimate Ears website describes it as a '360 degree speaker that drops bold, immersive sound in every direction' and once connected via bluetooth to my housemates iPhone he quickly and easily downloaded the UE Boom app and on came some mellow Bombay Bicycle Club before later on, with the drinks flowing, the drum and bass tunes tested the speaker's capabilities. The amount of noise this small speaker can produce is what seriously impressed us all. The other speaker in our house is a monster of a thing, and this tiny speaker with a height of 18cm and a diameter of 6.5cm, left us all bemused at the pure level of noise it was able to produce. The max sound level (not that I'm an expert in this area) is 88dBA...and from the experience of being stood next to it in a relatively small kitchen, I can tell you that its max volume is louuuuud.
I was sent a blue, white and yellow speaker and there is such a wide range of colour choices totalling up to 20 options of mixed colours, plain colours and even patterned ones costing the same price - though many of these are limited edition products so get your hands on them quick! I loved the combination of blue and white, however I found the yellow to be slightly offensive...not like it honestly hurt my feelings, just my eyes. The rest of the speaker, even the small features of yellow make it a very attractive design, however it was the charger that just put me off a little - though it certainly wouldn't stop me from purchasing it and it does make it very easy to find in a messy room! On the topic of the charger, it comes with a detachable USB, that can be connected to your laptop (for charging purposes I came to find rather than playing directly from it) and also two different adapters: an English one and a European one, which I thought was a great idea! These were also interchangeable and fold-able, so transporting the UE Boom to take abroad with you would be very easy.
The battery life also impressed me, we used it almost every night of Freshers' for a fair few hours each time, and it required only one charge during the week. The battery life is said to last 15 hours and I'd say that this is about right!
There's plenty of other features to the Boom that I didn't get the chance to try out, such as the alarm, which means you can set your speaker to wake you up with your favourite playlist. There's also the doubling up option, simply meaning you can use two speakers to create even more noise. Whilst I would have loved another speaker on hand to give this one a test, I can't say my neighbours would have appreciated it! Furthermore, the speaker is also water and stain resistant. I wasn't willing to test out the water resistance of it, but I did unintentionally manage to test its stain resistance with a few grubby finger prints and an accidental smudge of make-up. With a very quick wipe it looked brand new! So thumbs up for that claim! The final feature we never got to test out was taking calls from the speaker itself, which whilst not the most private of conversations, seems like a great idea if someone's a late arrival to the party and you're all stood outside unable to hear the doorbell!
There's one feature of this product that I questioned sharing, and after a long time pondering, and the speaker making me jump and my heart doing a little flip for the umpteenth time, I've concluded that to find this out, you'll have to buy it yourself!
Overall, my housemates, our friends and myself all had a hoot testing out this product and it certainly helped make prinks social, with the ability to move the speaker with minimal effort from room to room, and upstairs to downstairs - providing we stayed within 15ft of the device it was connected to (which wasn't hard in our small house). No one had a bad word to say about the product, even me who couldn't connect my own music to it (teaches me for not being up to date with technology). The design is simply perfect, and despite its deceiving size the UE Boom is definitely more than enough to get a house party going.
MissIsGoode
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