Mi Portable Bluetooth Speaker: A Speaker For Your Palm
Mi Portable Bluetooth Speaker: A Speaker For Your Palm
Our everyday lives have musical notes and harmonies interwoven into our routines, be it the unwelcome sounds of your alarm, or the welcoming notes of the much-awaited chuun paan. Perhaps that’s why we give such importance to music in our lives, and it has such a prominent presence in our houses and our minds.
Whether you’re at home or at work, it’s a common site to see a speaker, home theater system, headsets, or earphones in use at any time; there’s also going to people arguing over whether Spotify or Apple Music is the best, while that one person in every group just goes on to YouTube. With applications like these, music is ever more accessible, and so what device you use to listen to your music becomes ever more important.
Last week, I got my hands (or hand, you’ll see why) on the ‘Mi Portable Bluetooth Speaker’. Name wise, it doesn’t sound like much, but it was one of the most compact and cute speakers I’d seen. Case in point, the reason I couldn’t get both my hands on it was because it was too small. It fit quite neatly on my palm.
For Rs. 3,500, this speaker was the best option for my nearly-empty wallet; however, it delivered. Coming in a small and secure box just big enough to hold the speaker and the instruction manual, the entire box was deceptively tiny. However, a charging cable was not included, which I felt was sorely lacking (especially considering that it requires a micro-USB cable, and nowadays everyone has a type-C).
While mine was a very sleek steel grey, it does have variations of beige, silver, and black. With a very sleek cylindrical design and the speaker grille on top, it instantly catches your eye; provided you can find it first. The base of the speaker is rubber, handy when you’re playing bass-heavy music, and has both the power button and charging port on it as well, keeping the rest of the design very minimalistic.
Powering on and pairing was quite simple, as simply holding down the power button for a few seconds turns it on and off, and once it switches on it automatically enters pairing mode, so it’s easy to find it with your device. You can find it as ‘Mi Portable Bluetooth Speaker’ from your device’s Bluetooth menu. After the first time, if a device is already paired, it will automatically connect with it upon powering on. If after that, you want to pair with a different device, double tapping the power button is the way to go.
As expected from a speaker of its size and price, the Mi Portable doesn’t do much other than acting as the better-sounding and cuter-looking bluetooth sound outlet for your device, and only bluetooth, and only your device. Cable connecting isn’t available, and neither is playing through an SD card, sadly. This also has the unfortunate consequence of your notification tone interrupting a streaming playlist, just like it would on your device, unless you’ve had the foresight to put your device on silent.
However, once connected to your device, the speaker does a good job, with a remarkably loud volume (to be controlled from the connected device and not the speaker itself) if you amp it up. In fact, we were quite surprised at it when we first unwittingly maxed out our volume controls.
However, maxing out the volume isn’t advised, as the bass quality somewhat downgrades (felt more by me as a bass-lover, I’m sure other people didn’t find this quite as difficult). This isn’t much of a problem, considering audio is solid at mid level, which, as this is a speaker, is still pretty loud. On the plus side, other than the unfortunate lack of bass, there was no distortion at high volume, which was a plus.
We found the battery life to be quite solid. While not impressive overall, it did give me 4.5-5 hours on a full charge, although non-stop playing only lasted roughly four hours. Xiaomi also estimated a 4-hour battery life. However, to offset that, it charges up fairly quickly as well, so the trade-off is decent.
In conclusion, the Mi Portable Bluetooth Speaker has a high bar in terms of compactness, build quality, and design. The size and portability are where it really shines. While in terms of audio (and bass) it suffers somewhat, for its price it becomes the ideal budget speaker for the casual listener. More serious musicholics could look into opting for a model with SD card slots, a little more bass, and perhaps pairing between speakers.
