Anker Soundcore 3  Speaker Review

The Anker Soundcore 3 is a small, rectangular Bluetooth speaker with a similar design to the Anker Soundcore 2. It comes with a carrying strap you can attach to its side, making it easy to take when you're moving around. For a speaker with a removable carabiner clip and suction cup, check out the iFox iF012 shower speaker.

This speaker is incredibly portable. Its small, lightweight design makes carrying it in one hand easy. It even comes with a detachable carrying strap to help transport it when you're moving around. Additionally, this speaker is battery-powered, so you can take it outdoors without worrying about plugging it into a power outlet.

This speaker is decently built and is rated IPX7 for water resistance, meaning you can submerge it in water for up to 30 minutes. Its body is made of durable materials, and the buttons atop it are texturized. Aside from the metal grille protecting its drivers, its body is surrounded by a rubber-like contour that's unfortunately susceptible to collecting fingerprints. If you're looking for a similar speaker that's even better built, check out the Bose SoundLink Flex.

It has a great selection of controls. You can use its multifunction button to play and pause your music and accept, reject, and end phone calls. You can also double press it to skip to the next track, triple press it to skip back to your previous track, or press and hold it to activate your voice assistants.

It has + and - buttons you can use to adjust its volume to your liking, and has a Bluetooth button you can use to pair it to your devices, as well as to connect it to multiple other speakers with the PartyCast feature. Aside from the voice assistant feature, all the buttons trigger the same chime, which may confuse some users as it doesn't indicate which command has been registered.

• Anker Soundcore 3
• USB-C to USB-A charging cable
• Detachable carrying cord
• Quick Start guide

This speaker has mediocre frequency response accuracy. With its 'Bass Up' feature turned on, it struggles to reproduce the deep thump and rumble that fans of bass-heavy music tend to enjoy. Its treble range is also underemphasized, making higher-pitched vocals and instruments sound dull and veiled. That said, its somewhat balanced mid-range makes vocals and lead instruments sound clear, making it suitable for listening to dialogue-centric content like audiobooks and podcasts. Its companion app also features a graphic EQ and presets to tweak the speaker's sound to your liking.

This speaker's soundstage is acceptable. Although this speaker can play stereo content, it has poor directivity, which can cause its soundstage to sound narrow instead of wide and spacious, and your audio won't sound consistent from all angles. Check out the Bose SoundLink Revolve+ II for a speaker with better directivity.

The dynamics are sub-par. This speaker doesn't get very loud and has some compression artifacts at max volume, so your audio won't sound as clean and clear during louder listening sessions. For an Anker speaker with a better dynamics performance, consider the Anker Soundcore Motion Boom or the Anker Soundcore Select 2S.

This speaker has excellent battery performance. The manufacturer advertises that it can last up to 24 hours from a single charge, but we found in our tests that it could last over 13 hours. Battery life can vary depending on your usage habits, so your experience may differ. It also has a power-saving feature that you can set to automatically shut the speaker off after 5, 10, 30, or 60 minutes of inactivity. However, when you plug the speaker into a power source, it doesn't automatically turn off but instead goes into Standby Mode after a period of inactivity.

This speaker has a terrible voice assistant performance. Since it has no built-in voice assistants, it uses the ones available on your smartphone. It's compatible with Siri and Google Assistant but doesn't support Alexa. It struggles to pick up and register voice commands, even in quieter environments like your home.

This speaker is one of the few available at this price point to offer a companion app. It has fewer features than more premium speakers, but it still gives you some flexibility in setting up its sound. For example, it offers a PartyCast mode that you can use to connect up to 100 identical Soundcore speakers to play the same audio. There's also a graphic EQ that you can use to switch up its sound, giving you more control than with similarly-priced speakers like the EarFun UBOOM L.

This speaker has no ports you can use to connect devices via an analog connection. It has a USB-C port, which is only for charging the speaker.

This speaker has a good Bluetooth performance. It has an outstanding range, so your paired device can stay connected even when it's far from the speaker. It also has low AV synchronization error with Android devices, making it suitable for watching movies and videos. However, its performance isn't as good with iOS devices, which may disappoint some Apple users as there will be lip-synching issues between the audio and video. Some apps compensate for latency differently, so your experience may vary.

The manual states you can pair the Anker Soundcore 3 to two devices at once by pressing the Bluetooth button and re-entering pairing mode. However, we've found in our tests that re-entering pairing mode disconnects the currently paired device, so we couldn't connect two devices simultaneously. That said, changing connections between devices is still somewhat easy to achieve.