Review: Scosche boomBOTTLE Bottlecage Speaker for cycling
If you commute you will know that it can be a rather boring/repetitive endeavour and most of us seek entertainment during out commute.Cyclists are no different – and we would like entertainment too. There is an ongoing argument over whether you should wear headphones while you cycle or not and I certainly do not want to get into that here. What I will say is that I tend to listen to music very quietly if I do wear headphones, and this stops me enjoying most of my favourite music and half the time I don’t bother to listen to any due to this. An alternative to wearing headphones is to have a speaker mounted to your bike.
The solution to wires that would connect normal speakers is to use bluetooth speakers and there are certainly plenty of those around, however they’re generally not weather resistant, which in the UK poses a problem. So a dedicated speaker is a must. Scosche were kind enough to send me one of their boomBOTTLE speakers* to test and I’ve been commuting with it happily for the past few weeks.
The Scosche boomBOTTLE has been specifically designed to be mounted onto a bicycle. It is cylindrical and roughly the size of a bottle, which means it fits into most bicycle bottle cages. It is connected by bluetooth which speaks for itself and it is weatherproof (IPX4 rated). These factors together make it ideal as a bicycle mounted speaker.
Here it is on my bike:
To give you an idea of size, here is another shot of the bottle and the bike:
Now, I must say – I am a total and utter convert to the idea of cycling with a bicycle mounted speaker. The reasons are many and varied. The include:
- Pedestrians are more aware of your presence. Bicycles are silent as they roll along, and plenty of pedestrians rely on hearing the cars and cross without looking.
- You can listen to your favourite music at a decent volume without losing situational awareness. I can hear everything, from distant sirens to cars behind me edging closer and can take appropriate action.
So overall I am thrilled with it, as you can tell. There are one or two potential disadvantages. First – some people may feel uncomfortable playing music while they ride. Fortunately this is not a problem for me, but obviously this is something you would consider before you bought a bottle-cage speaker. The only time I feel awkward is when Queen’s “Bicycle Race” comes on, which makes me feel self conscious, and a bit of a bicycle geek. No matter, I’ll get used to it soon enough and it’s too good a song to delete from the iPod. Saying that, I do select my music relatively carefully, I tend to ease off the explicit lyrics and some of the more hardcore metal that I listen to. Apart from that, anything goes!
The boomBOTTLE has external controls for Vol Up, Vol Down and On/Off, which also doubles as a temporary pause button (pressing On/Off quickly).
The boomBOTTLE is the first product that I have ever given 5 stars to! Why?! – because the sound coming off the speaker is absolutely astounding. It’s been a bit of a party piece with my friends, who sync up to the speaker and play their favourite music through it to hear how it sounds. Everyone loves the bass response and the sound produced is brilliant, especially considering the size of the boomBOTTLE. In fact, on riding the bass frequencies shake the frame a little bit, and it takes a couple of rides to get used to this. The first time it happened, I was inspecting my frame for a problem, I thought the rear tyre had a puncture, or something sinister was happening to cause the frame to vibrate. I stopped to investigate and to my amusement, after a couple of seconds it became clear that the strange vibrations were happening at the same time as some of the bassline runs in the music! : )
The range of boomBOTTLEs from Scosche can be found here: http://www.scosche.com/catalogsearch/result/?q=boombottle&ok and the actual boomBOTTLE can be purchased in various places, including Halfords, and they have a listing here: http://www.halfords.com/cycling/accessories/cycle-computers-gps/scosche-boombottle-bluetooth-speaker
