I’ve been a long-time fan of the MegaBoom Bluetooth speakers from Logitech Ultimate Ears (the gray speaker on the right in the picture). I have the travel bug and therefore, have brought it though dozens of countries and always enjoyed that I could bring such a powerful speaker in such a small package. I can easily fit not one but two of them in my backpack and have a party ready to unpack at the perfect time in some random village in the Himalayan mountains or a picturesque beach on a small island in the Philippines.
Small, low quality Bluetooth speakers are horrible and make the most annoying noises. So much in fact that I’d rather just sit in silence than to have my ears raped with such poor sound quality. That being said, the MegaBoom really delivers quality sounds that could fill a large room or even your own little section of the open beach.
They have the best battery life (15 to 20 hours) and the clearest and largest sound of any speaker anywhere near it’s size and weight. Even though I paid $300 each, I’ve never had one ounce of buyer’s remorse and now 4 years later, through thick and thin at boat parties, pool parties, BBQs, camping, RVing, backpacking, kayaking, dropped on the ground, underwater, tumbled down the side of a mountain and and halfway around the world, I’ve even grown more fond and appreciative of my purchase over the years.
Ok, enough sucking up to UE because this time, they really let me down on the new MegaBlast. Its heavier, just a little bit bigger, has sharp edges that don’t pack as well but the biggest beef I have is that it only works in the US, UK and Germany because many of the features and controls for the speaker are only available through Alexa. This disables about 90% of the speaker’s features!
Even worse, they seem to have done away with the tap gestures to skip to the next track, play/pause, battery life checker and more which, disables it even further. As if that wasn’t bad enough, it won’t pair up with other UE speakers like the WonderBoom, Roll 2, Boom and MegaBoom can.
Needless to say, I am not happy with my purchase but I hope corrections will fix these issues in the next update and I hope that doesn’t take several months.