Gadget: Wowee One Portable Speaker

Published on Friday 18 September 2009 11:23

Wowee One Portable Speaker (£50, www.sfxtechnologies.com)

I normally shy away from reviewing speakers. They're generally as exciting as watching a sloth play chess. Portable ones are even worse, apart from the satsuma-sized X-mini II speaker that I reviewed a couple of months ago, the general rule of thumb in speaker world is that size matters. The challenge with any takeaway speaker is having a large enough speaker cone for the sound to reverberate. Most sound like a troupe of hyperactive chipmunks. The tiny X-mini II combated chipmunkitis by expanding like an accordion, while the Wowee speaker employs a far more cunning strategy for rodent-free sound reproduction.

About the same size as a TV remote, the Wowee speaker created by Edinburgh-based SFX Technologies feels relatively weighty for its diminutive proportions. It looks decidedly un-speaker like. It employs the services of your coffee table's molecules to reverberate sound using a technology the makers call "SFX Gel Audio", passing these symbiotic good vibrations through a plate on the bottom of the Wowee. Having experimented with everything from my toilet seat to a tropical fish tank, I came to the conclusion that anything solid and wooden sounded best. The quality of sound produced was actually pretty impressive – the Wowee itself handles most of the treble and mids, with the bass and general loudness determined by what you place it on.

If you pair the Wowee with a nice solid piece of wood, the little blighter can sound like Pavarotti's voice coming out of a pixie. It lacks a bit in the clarity department, but you'd be hard pressed to find a 50 portable speaker that can go so loud. Just watch you don't crank it up too much or it'll vibrate off the table!