Ultimate Ears MEGABLAST Portable Waterproof Wi-Fi and Bluetooth Speaker with Hands-Free Amazon Alexa Voice Control – Blue Steel

This Is the loudest best sounding small portable speaker on the market!!
I bought a Megablast at Best Buy. They had it marked down to $179 just before Christmas. I had been looking at them on Amazon and watching YouTube reviews and was a little bit hesitant because of some of the negative things said. I went to Best Buy and listened to almost every portable speaker they had and the mega blast and the JBL boombox sounded the best. I bought a JBL boombox through Amazon and I’ll be honest with you I am probably going to return it because the little mega blast is almost as loud as the boom box. It just has a little less base. I would rather have two mega blast speakers for the same money as the JBL boombox.I absolutely love this Megablast speaker. It is loud for a small portable speaker. I use it in my home as one of my many Alexa speakers for music throughout the house and then I simply grab it and go and Alexa goes with me. It works great as a standalone Bluetooth speaker with my iPhone as well. Some of the negative reviews said that when the music was turned up the Alexa could not hear your voice. That is true of almost every Alexa device that I have. This one actually seems to pick up your voice commands at loud or volumes better than most other Alexa devices I have used. The other negatives mention in reviews were that it doesn’t have a jack for an external audio input which doesn’t really bother me and that it did not have speakerphone functions building . This is a feature I detest in my other Bluetooth speakers because I answer my phone trying to have a private conversation and start battling with the Bluetooth speaker to prevent it from broadcasting my conversation to everyone. If that’s important to you then you probably don’t want this speaker, but it doesn’t bother me a bit. If you are invested in the Alexa platform and use it to control your home and play music throughout your home you will love this speaker.My recommendation is buy the speaker I think you’ll love it. It’s hard to beat the sound quality for its size. I’m going to buy more. And I just read on the Ultimate Ears website that in 2019 they are going to do a software update so you could connect up to 8 Megablast speakers together like you can their other speakers for party mode in case there’s an issue holding you back.

Best sound in a small package
I checked out ALL of the portable speakers on display at Best Buy, and this speaker had the best sound by far. Comparison included other speakers in similar price range from UE – Blast, Boom, Megaboom, Bose (which lacked clarity).Pros:UE Megablast is VERY clear in mid-range and has decent tight base – not artificially boomy, like some cheaper portable speakers. I found the sound quality review on WhatHiFi to be spot on – my impressions exactly. Built quality is solid – anyone with toddlers in the household will appreciate that this speaker can take some abuse. It can be knocked, dropped (even into a kitchen basin!) and still be OK (confirmed). The charging base is a must-have, and is overpriced. But the speaker looks so good, that it can be used both outdoor and indoor, permanently. The Blizzard color is very nice IMHO.Cons:Software is still in development. I recently got a second speaker and paired two speakers using the Beta version of the UE app. The app works, mostly. The pairing process is not 100% reliable, but once paired, you can fill a whole house with music, not just one room. Or you can do a true left-right stereo setup.Overall, sound quality more than compensates for software being somewhat raw.

There is nothing to dislike about the MEGABLAST. It was easy to set up and I love being able to access Alexa directly through my new outdoor speaker. It sounds great and the battery lasts all day. I love that it is waterproof. No more worries about forgetting it out in the rain.Alexa timers are an issue when using multi timers. They stick on and you need to shut the machine down to cancel the timers. Hopefully a fix comes with a future update. It would also be nice to be able to add this speaker to an Alexa speaker group so you can have it included when you have music playing on the “everywhere group”. Perhaps with a future update?It would be nice to have a chime notification that Alexa is listening in addition to the existing light bar notification. Your not always in position to see the light bar.I’ve had it more than a month now and no problems whatsoever. I would recommend it to anyone.

This speaker is very misleading, it states you can use it with Alexa anywhere but that is not the case, Alexa requires wifi to work. You have to connect the speaker itself to a wifi network every time you want to use the Alexa feature. The speaker itself is very good however the battery life is no where close to what’s advertised. I have an old ueboom2 and this megablast lasts the exact same amount of time even though I’ve used my old speaker everyday for 3 years.I’m a little disappointed, I had purchased the larger speaker mainly for the battery life and sound quality, as stated up above the battery life is not what’s advertised. The speaker will die after 8 hours of play at half volume. Certainly not the 16 hours it boasts that’s for sure.However I have to admit the sound quality is incredible. Very tight bass and almost no distortion at full volume. If you’re buying this speaker purely to use a Bluetooth speaker than I would recommend the ue megaboom3 instead. You would receive identical sound and 25 percent longer battery life at a lower cost as well.