Anker Soundcore Motion+ Speaker Review

The Anker Soundcore Motion Plus is a fairly small speaker with a rectangular shape. It's meant to sit horizontally, and its edges are rounded. The control buttons are on top of the speaker, including a multifunction button and a BassUp button.

The Anker Soundcore Motion Plus is outstandingly portable. It's small and lightweight, so you can easily carry it in one hand. Also, it's battery-powered, so you can bring it out and about without having to find an outlet.

The Anker Soundcore Motion Plus has decent build quality. It feels solid, and there's a metal grille covering the two drivers. Most of the speaker's exterior is made of silicone, and the buttons on top are texturized, making them easy to find by touch. It also has an IPX7 rating for water resistance, though we don't currently test for this. Though it lacks a rating for impact resistance, the manual suggests you should be careful not to drop it.

The Anker Soundcore Motion Plus has very good controls. On top, there's a multifunction button to play/pause your audio, which you can also press twice to skip ahead and three times to backtrack. You can also use it to accept and end a call. At the top left, there's a BassUp button advertised to increase the bass in your audio. On top, there are also three separate buttons for adjusting the volume and pairing a device over Bluetooth. The power button is located on the side. There's also a light that turns solid blue when the speaker is connected to Bluetooth, solid white when it's connected to True Wireless Stereo, and solid red when it's charging. The light flashes red when the battery is low and flashes blue when it's searching for a Bluetooth pairing or when there's an incoming call.

• Anker Soundcore Motion+ speaker
• USB-C to USB-A charging cable
• 3.5mm AUX cable
• User Manual

The Anker Soundcore Motion Plus has an adequate frequency response accuracy. With the BassUp feature turned on, it still struggles to reproduce low-bass. Because of this, you may not feel the deep thump and rumble in bass-heavy genres like hip-hop or EDM. It has a fairly well-balanced midrange, so vocals and lead instruments are reproduced clearly. However, its treble is a bit underemphasized, so higher frequencies are perceived as a bit dark. Fortunately, its companion app includes a graphic EQ that lets you customize sound to your liking.

The Anker Soundcore Motion has a decent soundstage. Its directivity is okay, so its soundstage is perceived as somewhat narrow rather than open and spacious. Fortunately, it can play stereo content without downmixing it to mono.

The Anker Soundcore Motion has okay dynamics. It can get quite loud, which is useful for playing music at a party or outdoors. However, there are some compression artifacts when you play it at max volume.

The Anker Soundcore Motion Plus has amazing battery life. The manufacturer advertises a battery life of 12 hours, but in our tests, the speaker lasted over 15 hours. Battery life can vary depending on usage, so user experience may vary. There's also a power-saving feature that you can adjust through the app. You can set it to automatically shut off after 5, 10, 30, or 60 minutes without audio.

The Anker Soundcore Motion Plus has terrible voice assistant capabilities. It uses the voice assistant from your smartphone when it's paired via Bluetooth. As part of our methodology, we use recorded voice messages to test the speaker's response. It wasn't able to register any of these commands, even while close by and without any background noise. It can register questions from a normal speaking voice, but this isn't part of our testing process.

The Soundcore companion app is okay. It's compatible with iOS and Android and it comes with some preset EQ settings like 'Bass Up', 'Bass Off', 'Voice', 'Heavy', 'Classic', and 'Original'. There's also a full graphic EQ that lets you customize the sound to your liking. While you can pair two speakers together to create a stereo pair, this can only be done using Bluetooth, not through the app. Also, the app doesn't include features like Party Mode or Multi-Room, which allow you to connect multiple speakers for a louder sound or between rooms.

The Anker Soundcore Motion Plus has an AUX port that you can use to connect your smartphone to the speaker to play audio.

The Anker Soundcore Motion Plus has excellent Bluetooth connectivity. It has an incredible range, staying connected to your smartphone even from a distance. Its latency with iOS and Android devices is also quite low, making it suitable for watching movies or videos. That said, some apps compensate for latency differently, so your experience may vary. You can also pair it with two devices at a time, which is really convenient when you're frequently switching your audio source between your phone and laptop.

This speaker isn't Wi-Fi compatible.