Bose recently refreshed its SoundLink Bluetooth speaker line with two new products: the SoundLink Home, released today, and the second generation of the SoundLink Flex, which hit store shelves last week.
As the name suggests, the SoundLink Home is the home counterpart to the SoundLink Flex, which is designed to be taken on the go. This one is meant to live on your bookshelf and hopefully fill your room with its guaranteed premium sound. It retails for $219 and is available in two colorways for the US: Light Silver and Cool Grey. In China, there’s an additional Warm Wood, which I wish was an option for us, too.
If you listen at maximum volume, Bose’s latest speaker promises nine hours at a full charge and two and a half hours. That battery life isn’t very impressive at this price point, considering Sony’s recent Ult Field 1 offers 12 hours for $129. Sony’s offering is an outdoor speaker where a long-lasting battery life becomes extra crucial, but if I’m investing over $200, I wouldn’t want to be tethered to a socket even within the confines of my house. The SoundLink Home also takes four hours to fully recharge, which I’m unsure if I have the patience for.
Its connectivity features sound a bit better. There’s multipoint up to two devices and an additional wired connectivity option over Type-C. It also offers a stereo mode that can be enabled by pairing two SoundLink Home speakers, just like on the JBL Go 4 and Click 5. The two speakers act as a left and right stereo channel in this setup. Sadly, it lacks a party mode (usually present on speakers with stereo mode), which would allow the two connected speakers to play from the same source instead of assigned L and R channels.
Another glaring omission on the new SoundLink Home is that it doesn’t connect to the Bose Connect app for adjusting EQ on the fly. It also doesn’t feature dust or water resistance, which is a consequence of being an in-the-home speaker and something you might not require anyway.
If you’re looking for a portable speaker with dust, water, shock, and rust resistance, a beefier battery lasting 12 hours, party mode along with a stereo mode, and adjustable EQ on the Bose app, the new $149 2nd-Gen SoundLink Flex should be your pick. For its modest price, this one also offers fancy features such as PositionIQ tech, which auto-senses the speaker’s position (hanging, standing, lying) and adjusts its audio in real time. The SoundLink Flex Gen 2 is admittedly clunkier and far less flashy than the SoundLink Home, but its use case warrants that dramatically different design, too.
