When it comes to listening to music or watching films on your smartphone, tablet or laptop, the sound quality is one of the biggest issues – namely that it is not loud enough. There are a number of portable speaker options, but these can often mean messy wires and sometimes complicated balancing acts. These issues become a thing of the past with one of the latest Kickstarter sell-out success stories; The Zooker Wireless speaker bar.
The way it works is all via Bluetooth, simply sync and play. The design of the speaker is one of our favourite things about it, a sleek silicon bar that has a neat slot that allows it to sit on your laptop screen or tablet. It even has a ridge that means it won’t obscure your camera. Although the Zooka is marketed towards the MacBook and iPad’s of the world, it can fit and sync with any Bluetooth enabled device. It comes with simple buttons that allow you to turn the device and its Bluetooth on and volume controls for up and down.
When it comes to quality of the music it clearly isn’t going to take on a proper speaker, but it certainly doubles the sound coming out of your device and it’s far better then the often tinny sound that you would get without it. We’ve been using it in the office for a couple of weeks now and it has been impressive, plus the fact that it was connected via Bluetooth meant that anyone could be DJ for the day without constantly plugging it in and out of various laptops.
One downside of the Bluetooth connection is that it could at times be a little crackly, especially if you were streaming music from the web rather then direct from your stored music. A handy 3.5mm audio jack means that you can always plug in direct – but then of course you have the issue of wires again.
The Zooka comes with a microUSB to USB cord to charge with, but it is WAY too small to be of any use and we’ve used another one that we had lying around and would suggest you do to. Although for the £79.99 price-tag, I’d expect not to have to purchase a new cable.
Overall we love the Zooka, it has a great portability design and the boost that it gives your music is brilliant. We’d give it an 8.5/10 and you can pick one up now from Amazon here, a perfect Christmas present.