Ue boom mini1/20/2024 It’s mediocre in the home, loses its smartspeaker features on the go, and is quite expensive compared to the competition.Īt the end of the day, you should only consider the UE Blast if you’re looking for an excellent sounding portable and waterproof speaker with some nice voice assistant features in the home. This makes the UE Blast a confusing and compromised product. On the go, Alexa becomes entirely useless and the UE Blast will be a simple Bluetooth speaker you control via your phone. If you must play music loudly and want more bass, you should check out the bigger MEGABLAST. It also gets quite loud but sound quality suffers as it gets louder, sounding brittle and harsh. The speaker sounds great across a variety of genres with a nice, slightly warm tonal balance and it produces a good amount of bass for the speaker of its size. While we were also disappointed by the UE Blast’s smartspeaker features, it remains one of the best portable Bluetooth speakers you can buy. It was a stark difference using our Google Home Mini and especially the Apple HomePod, which is great at picking up our commands, even when music is playing at full blast. We found ourselves shouting at the speaker constantly for it to pick up our commands. Voice sensitivity is good if you’re in a quiet environment with music playing softly but once you turn up the tunes or are outside, the UE Blast does a poor job picking up voice commands. Amazon says it plans to support other streaming services in the future but there’s currently no timeline. There’s support for Pandora, iHeartRadio, and a few other services but it’s disappointing that there’s no voice support for all the major music streaming services. But if you use Apple Music, Google Play Music, or Spotify, you’re limited to streaming your music over Bluetooth instead of using voice. If you live in Amazon’s world and subscribe to Amazon Music, Alexa is great. Let’s talk about the headline feature of the UE Blast first: Amazon’s Alexa voice assistant is onboard and you’ll either love or hate it. While we enjoyed having the Power Up dock around the house, we really felt UE should include the dock with the UE Blast, or at least make it more affordable as it’s necessary in order to use the Blast as a smartspeaker in the home. Thankfully, you’ll never have to do this if you buy the optional Power Up dock for $40 (£35, about AU$65) as you can simply place the speaker on the dock to charge. It’s a little cumbersome to unscrew the loop every time you have to charge the speaker. It’s disappointing that Ultimate Ears didn’t include USB-C as most phones and laptops these days use the port. On the bottom of the speaker you’ll find a screwdown loop that holds down the cover which hides the microUSB charging port. Disappointingly, though, there are no playback buttons so you’ll have to either use Alexa to control playback or your phone if you’re streaming music via Bluetooth. On top of the speaker you have a power and pairing button with a nice white indicator light while on the front of speaker you'll find big volume buttons. If you're keen to match your portable speaker to your camping gear, the Blast comes in white, black, merlot and blue. UE kept the cloth exterior that’s now iconic among its line of portable waterproof speakers. The two speakers look nearly identical with the UE Blast sporting a more cylindrical shape with sharp lines. The design of the UE Blast is a major refinement over the UE Boom 2.
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