Those of you that know me well, know that I am a gadget freak through and though – if it’s got a screen or flashing led’s then I will be interested in it!
This month we look at the growing trend in wireless speaker technology. More and more of us are using our mobile devices (tablets and smartphones) to listen to music. The problem is that the speakers that are integrated into these devices usually are not of great quality. Adding a wireless speaker to your device will give you both better quality and a longer battery life (because the tablet isn’t having to use its battery to play the music).
There are two types of wireless speakers, those that connect to your tablet directly via bluetooth and are ‘dumb’ speakers that simply play whatever is on your tablet and those that connect to your home network wirelessly and have some intelligence (like the Amazon echo we reviewed the other month), these speakers are able to play music independently of your tablet or smartphone.
The first type of speaker can be bought for around 20-50 euros from any decent electrical store. They are usually the size of a small fizzy drinks can and are easy to connect to your phone/tablet via bluetooth. Once connected they will automatically reconnect any time they are turned on, making it easy to play your tunes any time you want.
The ‘better’ speakers, like the Sonos speaker that I bought cost a couple of hundred euros, but have much more functionality. Once connected to your home network they can be configured to play music independently of your tablet. They can, for example, play your favourite playlist from the store of music on your computer or home server or they can play an Internet stream from a local radio station – we have TKO playing on ours – or they can even connect to a music streaming service like Amazon Prime Music and play songs from your favourite artist or group – overall they are much more flexible and of course, as you would expect with the price, the quality of the sound is much better than that which you get from the cheaper speakers.