Wireless Earbuds Bose Portable Home Speaker
A well-balanced beacon of portable audio.
The more recent wave of Bluetooth speakers on the market have stepped the line between portability and smart home functionality, and the Portable Home Speaker from Bose does so rather nimbly.
The speaker itself is relatively lightweight and compact, which lends credence to the ‘Portable’ component of its title, as does the 12-hours of battery life. This is especially true when you consider its lantern-esque carry handle, which makes you feel like something of an old-timey adventurer traversing misted swamps, cutting through the dull fog of silence with its audio brilliance. While alternatives like the Sonos Move might deliver more on the bass front, they’re also considerably larger (and generally more expensive). The Portable Home Speaker packs solid power for its size, with the audio radiating out of the grill-clad lower third of the unit to sound pleasant and warm, dodging the tinny quality that some Bluetooth speakers can adopt.
Setting up the device with your home Wi-Fi, voice assistant, and music service of choice is done through the Bose Connect app and is incredibly straightforward. Outside of voice control via Google Assistant or Amazon Alexa’s built-in help, this Bose unit has a decent array of controls on its top, including a microphone mute button to help maintain your privacy.
There are non-smart Bluetooth speakers at lower price points (the UE Boom range, for instance) that would probably tick many of the same boxes for most customers. There are also portable smart speakers costing considerably more (Sonos Move), but this offering from Bose is pretty hard to beat if you want something in between.