Ultimate Ears Megablast
Alexa is on the move
Not only is voice recognition good, the Megablast delivers excellent 360-degree sound, too
£269.99 FROM Ultimate Ears, ultimateears.com features 360-degree sound, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, Amazon Alexa integration, waterproof and dustproof (IP67)
The Megablast is a speaker with the portability, durability and 360-degree sound of the UE Boom, and the smarts of an
Amazon Echo. But it doesn’t come cheap, with a £269.99 price tag.
It’s hard to call the Megablast a like-for-like Echo replacement, as it does require you to purchase the Power Up dock from Ultimate Ears (sold separately) to truly recreate the Echo experience. This dock connects to the silver D-ring on the base of the speaker and charges it. While this acts as a charger and an Alexa cradle, buying the dock means adding £34.99 to an already expensive speaker.
Though the Megablast can run for an impressive 16 hours, without the dock and no music to play it automatically goes into power-saving mode. This means that no matter how loudly you shout, Alexa won’t hear you. Power-saving mode is useful for a Bluetooth speaker that you’re inclined to leave lying around, but it doesn’t make for a particularly convenient smart speaker.
With the dock, however, we found the Megablast to be a good Echo replacement. Not only is its voice recognition as good, the Megablast offers better sound, too, delivering excellent 360-degree audio. In every room where we used it, Megablast filled the space, going loud without distortion. Impressively, at a sound level that’s at the higher end of acceptability for indoor listening, it doesn’t fail to register Alexa requests.
You can only access the Megablast’s Alexa capabilities when the speaker is connected to a Wi-Fi hotspot. You can still connect to your mobile Wi-Fi hotspot though, if you want to access Alexa’s hands-free music controls on the go. But without your mobile hotspot or Wi-Fi, the UE Megablast reverts back to a standard Bluetooth speaker. While it has plenty of potential and many positives, the Megablast isn’t perfect. The most notable issue is that unlike an actual Echo speaker, it doesn’t support popular music streaming services like Spotify and Apple Music – you’re more or less limited to Amazon Music. You can still use these services over Bluetooth, but you can’t use Alexa to control them with your voice.
Sounds like a winner
Using the Megablast requires two apps – Ultimate Ears’ own app for setting up and audio controls, and the main Alexa app for Alexa customisation and skill installation. Although this isn’t the most streamlined approach, we didn’t find it grating.
At the moment, it’s not possible to link your Megablast speaker to any other UE device, but Ultimate Ears has said that it will fix this in a future software update.
Overall, the Megablast may be Ultimate Ears’ best sounding speaker yet. It hasn’t quite lived up to all of our expectations – it feels like a speaker with some smarts rather than an outright smart speaker – but when it gets Alexa support for a wider range of music services and can create a multiroom speaker network, it’ll be pretty damn close.