The SoundWave SW50 is a portable Bluetooth speaker that allows you to listen to your music or take calls.  It’s small and looks great but how does it sound?

Read on to find out what I thought.

The packaging is great and easy to get into. It contains the speaker, a USB cable for charging and the instructions.  One thing to note here is that once you have it opened it will be worth connecting to a computer straight away to get it charging as you might have problems syncing, more on this later.

The SW50 has a minimal design with the speaker on the top then a single mini USB  port on the back for charging, an ON/OFF switch, a MIC and a call pickup button.

Setup is easy, although it took a hard reset of my iPhone 4S for it to pick up the speaker in the Bluetooth list.  The process is first to turn on the speaker then on the iOS device go to Settings -> Bluetooth and flick the switch to ON.  In the devices list you should then see the SW50 (as above).  Click this and type in the default passcode.

Once setup is complete  you can then use the SW50 for calls and or streaming your music.  When a call comes in you can hit the green button below the MIC and I found call quality to be excellent.  It had no problem picking up my voice and the call came across really clear. I am in a good signal zone at home though but i’m sure this wont affect the call quality, remember the speaker provides a good sound.

Getting music to the speaker is easy as well. Once you are paired the sound will push to the speaker automatically.  Don’t think it’s like AIRPLAY where you have to push it to the device, it’s paired.  For such a small speaker it sounded great. I played anything from classical to thrash metal.  The bass response is pretty good but I found that it sounded best with trebly tunes like classical piano and strings.

If you are looking for a solution to being able to stream music around the house, such as getting some music into your kitchen or garage, then this is a great product.  I don’t tend to take calls on the speaker so didn’t use it too much but I can see the use-case.  The sound quality is great even though it’s only a small speaker and it’s easy to use so once it’s initially setup you are good to go from then on.

See more bluetooth speakers at Mobile Fun.

MSRP: £19.99 ($31)

PROS: Great price, nice design, good battery life

CONS: Needs to be charged via a computer