The following article is brought to you by Raghav Govindarajan and 1ByOne. -Ed.
We’ve all been in those situations where we needed our music to be just a bit louder or even portable. I know I’ve been to social events like picnics and small parties where I need that extra oomph in my music. I was able to find that extra firing power in the form of a seven inch speaker made by 1byone.
The 1byone Wireless Portable Bluetooth Speaker is a pretty small speaker, relatively speaking. It is about the size of my HTC One M8 in terms of length, and width. It is a very light speaker, and I will admit that initially threw me off. I did not think that this tiny speaker would be capable of producing a respectable sound, but boy was I wrong. Syncing the speaker was not a difficult task at all, it was as simple as holding the power button until you heard the confirmation that the speaker was on. It automatically starts searching for devices, and I was able to immediately able to sync to it with no issues. After that, I took a look at the interesting interface. The top of the device has 4 buttons that act as the control panel, with the rest of the circles acting as an aesthetically pleasing effect.
The power button does exactly what you expect it to do once you hold it down for 3 seconds. The play button has a very satisfying bump to it when you press down, and minus the one or two seconds of hang up time, it worked perfectly fine. The last two buttons are the volume up and down buttons. Double tapping either of these buttons will switch the track, with the volume down button going to the beginning/ previous song, and volume up to the next song. The back of the speaker has a concealed panel where you can plug your device in via 3.5mm jack, and a charging port. This speaker sports a 1500 maH battery which is pretty impressive considering some of the older generations of iPhone have the same battery.
The speaker itself sounds good. I like the fact that the bass is not that over powering (tested with the album R.A.P. Music by Killer Mike, a hip hop/ rap album) and that the highs cut through somewhat well. The mids are kind of drowned out, but I sort of expected that with a speaker in this price point. The Bluetooth connectivity did provide an issue every now and then with the music cutting out, but it was very minimal and only occurred for a brief second. Lastly, taking calls with this device is surprisingly easy considering there’s a mic in the speaker. The quality cannot be all that great, but it’s nice knowing the feature is there if I ever need it.
One thing that I found noteworthy about this speaker is how durable the damn thing is. The rubber casing on the side is definitely meant to be shock resistant and it really helps considering how frequently I tend to drop things. The speaker comes with a USB cable to charge the device and an aux cable to connect the any device that has a 3.5mm jack to the speaker, but again, the cables are entirely too small, probably less than a foot. If the cables were longer, this speaker would be a lot better off.
I overall really like the speaker. I wish the cables were longer and that the Bluetooth was a little more consistent, but the sound quality is great and the build quality is quite durable. I’d fully recommend this to anyone looking for a cheap portable speaker. You can find the 1byone Bluetooth Portable Speaker here or from their Amazon page!
Written by Raghav Govindarajan
