Oraolo Wearable Bluetooth Speaker

I do like Bluetooth speakers. You may have noticed! I always seem to have trouble with in-ear buds staying in my right ear. Left is fine. Right is not. I'm clearly deformed! I've tried all sorts of tricks and followed all sorts of tips (literally)! But nothing works. So most of the time it's over the ears/head headphones for me.

I know I shouldn't care about wearing headphones out and about doing my steps in the public arena, but I do. I feel a bit of a numpty. However people reassure me and however many youngsters I see doing it without a care in the world it seems, I just don't feel 'right' about it somehow. So I'm always looking for new ways to listen to music and this time have ended up with something completely new to me, a clip-on speaker known as the Oraolo Wearable BT Speaker!

Amazon has quite a lot of these, mostly, nay all of them, I think, out of China with wildly varying prices - and reviews from people buying them. There are the expensive Sony neckband units which I'm sure are really good (and a load of cheap copies of that) but it seems that there's a lot of cheap rubbish that needs wading through, which I did before settling on this one. Buy one for a tenner and you get what you pay for, to a large degree, it seems. This one's list price is £108.99 today, which is equally absurd! Fortunately, like a good MFI dining room table, it's always on sale - usually with at least 50% off - so bide your time if you're going to, as I got the 50% and a 27% Voucher and ended up paying about £22 for mine! And I think that at that price, it's about right.

It's a neat-looking black unit with a power button up the top of the front, for turning on/off and pairing and underneath, a grille/mesh covering the rest, with big JBL-style plus and minus clicky buttons for volume, primarily. The click is nice and firm. It's the best part of 3" long, just over an inch fat and an inch and a half wide. Then, on the back, there's the 'clip'. It's a strong, sturdy clip which doesn't feel like it's going to break anytime soon. It's almost as wide as the unit itself so affords a good grip to whatever you clip it to. As you can see from the diagram, it's 2.2oz, which is just over 60g, so hanging from a shirt or lapel is really no problem and I have found it to be hardly noticeable. The clip opens up quite broadly so it can be clipped to backpacks, bags or whatever but it's certainly not broad enough to be clipped onto the average bike frame/handlebar - still I guess it can then be clipped to something else on a bike, like a saddle - or probably more sensibly, clothing anyway!

Apart from adjusting the volume up and down, the track can be moved along by long-pressing either of the two plus/minus buttons, but bizarrely, it's minus for forward and plus for back! What? Who thought that would be a good idea, I wonder! The power button is also used for play/pause and answer/end calls. I've tried to invoke Gemini (Live) by using the device itself but can't find a way, however, if you start the conversation on the phone whilst the device is paired and active, you can then walk away from the phone and keep the conversation going both ways with just the speaker. Notifications don't seem to make it through in my testing, like they do with all the same gear but with headphones/buds, this is usually largely down to supporting software/apps, which this doesn't have. So it's really more of a listening/phone calls device. It pairs up quickly and easily and the range away from source actually seems quite impressive with Bluetooth.

The sound is actually quite good. It's not going to win any awards for quality, but it is better and louder than any mobile phone I have ever tried. Not surprising as it would need to be a giant phone to house a speaker the size that's in this thing, dinky as it is! I played around with various phones and their respective Equalisers, even tried out the Wavelet app which we often speak warmly about, and yes, as usual, you can make the sound better than it is without these tools. And there's plenty of volume to play with, so the usual payoff with phones becomes insignificant in that respect.

Out and about is tricky, of course. I have tried it but you have to be very aware of folk around you and not annoying them, as with any sound that's not in one's ears. The bloke on the bus comes to mind! But walking along, alone, it's fine. In amongst loud traffic it's not really. This is for more rural, quieter environments. I have it clipped to my shirt above my sternum and that seems to work well. I did try it clipped to my rucksack's strap on my shoulder whilst in loud traffic, which made it better of course as it's nearer to at least one ear!

It's not just for out and about though. There are domestic uses too, like for example, I had it hooked up to my Roku Streambar, attached to my telly, across the room. That gets the sound of the TV next to the viewer. No stereo of course, but the channels do get routed into mono of course, so you don't lose any of it. And wandering around the house, too, make a cup of tea, go to the loo! And the added benefit over ear/headphones that you can clearly hear what's going on around you if, for example, the doorbell is rung.

The battery supposedly lasts for 18 hours and charges with the supplied USB-A to USB-C cable (or any other one you have). Well, in my tests it actually lasted about 8-10 hours on 100% volume. To get 18 hours, you'd have to have it at 60%, they say in the blurb. It charges up from flat in about 90 minutes. It's supposed to waterproof (to some degree) but I have not tested that!

Anyway, that's been my quick thoughts on the unit and I'm very pleased to have it as an option for when I give up, yet again, with earphones and don't want to use headphones or blast the neighbours with my Marshall Acton III! I do have the JBL Clip 5 but small as that is, it's still not as dinky and light as this one - although you do get significantly better sound. If you get it for the same £22 that I did, then it's certainly worth the outlay. Any more and I wouldn't have bothered.