My main portable media player is the Creative Zen Vision. It does it's job quite well, plays video pretty well, except for the fact that it doesn't play AC3 streams which makes it a little inconvinient when trying to rip DVDs to play on it. But that's another rant. The rant for today is the fact that the speaker on the Vision.. is pathetic! It produces sound, but dont expect the sound to be audible if you have anything more than a fan running.

So I've been constantly trying to find a proper portable speaker to use with it, my previous attempt was the Creative PopZ speaker, which although it was unpowered it was quite well... for unpowered speakers that is.. it pasted the portability test cause it sealed up into a nice carryable case. But still wasn't loud enough for enviroments like say... a chinese wedding dinner?

So again I went looking for portable speakers, I saw some around but I didn't like the size.. or the price.. considering some of them were charging above RM100 for a small pair of speakers. Then I saw this small little powered speaker being sold for.. RM39.

I thought.. hey what the heck.. it's RM39.. it wouldn't be that big a loss if it doesn't work out. And after I got home and tried it out this is the summary of the little guy.

The Good

• My god the thing is LOUD!!! I don't see how this can't pass the wedding dinner test, heck.. my wife would probably tell me to turn it down!
• It recharges it's internal battery through USB.
• The sound plug is integrated so no wires to loose.

The Bad

• The battery is an internal lithium ion battery... given typical lithium ion battery lifespans.. this would probably last oh.. 1.5 ~ 2 years?
• It recharges through USB.. but the head LOOKS like a non standard one, I'll know after I do a quick run into the cable bin over at Sri Computer or All IT mall at Low Yat cause I remember seeing a few different types of Mini A type cables there.
• The sound plug is integrated, so it means that the thing just sticks out of the audio jack of your device so it can get in the way. A short audio extension cable should solve that.

The mini speaker also has one more little trick..

The extremely broken manual calls this the RESONATOR which is supposed to make your sound more bassy now that it has some place to bounce around.

All in all, this is highly recommended if all you wanted was to hear the sound coming out from your devices properly, since I don't think this is gonna pass any audiophille test anytime soon.