HAVE A CUP OF BASS WITH GEAR4'S EXPRESSO SPEAKER

Care for a cup of expresso? But it contains booming music instead of coffee!

        It was only recently when I appreciated Bluetooth speakers. We were able to try one during our first wireless portable speaker review (here) and we were in awe on how you can play loud music wirelessly with music from your phone. It was a little bigger than this one, so I thought the sounds of this cute speaker would just be okay.... 

Boy was I wrong! 

GEAR4's Espresso packs quite a punch with it's surprisingly amazing bass!

        GEAR4's Espresso, first of all, has a clever and unique coffee cup design. So you can imagine how cute this would look on your desk. "Is the music coming from your coffee cup?!"

Inside the cup are the speaker wholes thingy. Whatever you call them.

        I like how they placed their logo on the inner part of the handle. It looks cleaner that way. And as you can see, the handle looks fold-able.

        ...that's because it is! It's a clip handle that you can press inwards to open, and hook it on your bag or wherever! Pretty cool. Except that the opening of the handle is not that wide. Which means the places of hooking them on are pretty limited. Only on slim stuff like a thin bag strap, or on the loops of your shorts or jeans (those strips of denim cloth that holds the belt in place). You can't possibly hook this on the handle bars of your bike, etc. But this is not really an issue if you don't like playing loud music while on the go, out in the open. And because it's pretty small, you can put it in your jacket pocket or bag pocket anyways.

        Connectivity is the same as other Bluetooth speakers. Just scan for "Espresso" Bluetooth and connect. The little blue light is on when the device when you're connected. The power button is at the bottom of the cup.   It's got a range of 10m, depending on line of sight. The box contains a USB charger and a start up guide.

        For such a small "cup", I was really amazed at the quality of the sound it emits. I immediately noticed the difference especially in the bass. You can even feel it kind of vibrate a bit when you wrap your hand around it while you play music. I checked the specs and found out the reason behind this awesome bass. This is because Espresso has an additional passive radiator ported out of the bass which enhances the bass tone a lot! A neat trick for this small speaker to produce that kind of bass!

        But I guess having that much bass uses up a lot of charge because it is also noticeable how fast the battery runs out compared to the first speaker we tried. The battery of this is only up to 4 hours. But that won't be a problem if you don't use it all the time.

Cheers!

        One thing that I don't like about this is that busy phone line sound it makes when it's low batt. It's a bit annoying because it goes off every few seconds until you charge it. But other than the battery life and the annoying low batt tone, I think this speaker is pretty cool! Cheers to Espresso!

The GEAR4 Espresso is P1,350 and are available at the following stores:

Beyond the Box, Digital Walker, Digital Hub, Astrovision Shangri-La, Astrovision Festival Mall, Astrovision Trinoma AstroPlus Mega Mall, AstroPlus SM Aura, iStudio Shangrila, iStudio Bonifacio High Street, Mobile1 Alabang Town Center, Mobile1 Rockwell

For more information, visit http://www.gear4.com/product/_/1326/espresso/