Bose SoundLink Color II Speaker Review

The Bose SoundLink Color II is a small, square-shaped speaker that's meant to sit vertically. It's fairly flat and has a silicone design. It comes in five colors: 'Soft Black', 'Aqua Blue', 'Citron', 'Polar White', and 'Coral Red', so you can find a look that fits your style.

The Bose SoundLink Color II Bluetooth speaker is incredibly portable. It's small and lightweight, and you can carry it with one hand. Since it has a battery, you can use it outside without having to plug it into an outlet.

The Bose SoundLink Color II is decently built. The speaker is covered in a thick layer of silicone, but there's no covering for the AUX and micro-USB ports. It has an IPX4 rating for water resistance, although we don't currently test for this. It doesn't have an advertised rating for dust or impact resistance. There are three lights on top that indicate when it's on, connected to Bluetooth, and receiving audio input.

The Bose SoundLink Color II Bluetooth speaker has very good controls. It has six buttons located on the top. There's a power button, buttons for adjusting the volume, and a Bluetooth button, which lights up once a device is connected. The play/pause button can be pressed twice to skip a track or three times to go to the previous track. The input button lets you connect a device through the AUX port to play audio, and lights up when in use. If you press the power button, it'fll give you an audio indicator for the battery level. If you press the Bluetooth button, it will audibly indicate its connection status. There's also a light that indicates the battery level, as well as a light that flashes twice when it reaches min/max volume.

• Bose SoundLink Color speaker
• Micro-USB charge cable
• User Manual

The Bose SoundLink Color II has sub-par frequency response accuracy. It really struggles to produce low-bass, which may disappoint fans of bass-heavy music genres like EDM. The mid-range is well-balanced, so vocals and lead instruments are reproduced clearly. However, the higher frequencies of those same instruments may be a bit dark or dull due to the underemphasized treble range. Unfortunately, it doesn't have any sound customization features for tweaking its sound profile.

The Bose SoundLink Color has a fair soundstage. It can play stereo content without downmixing it into mono, but its directivity is poor, resulting in a narrow soundstage. There's also an overemphasis in the treble range, so the soundstage may seem uneven from certain angles.

The Bose SoundLink Color has passable dynamics. It doesn't get especially loud, and there are some compression artifacts present at max volume. Because of this, it's not well-suited for use at parties or in large rooms.

This speaker has a good battery performance. Though its battery is advertised to last for eight hours, in our tests it lasted for close to ten hours. That said, battery life can vary according to usage, so user experience may differ. It takes around four hours to charge, and it saves power by shutting off automatically after eighteen minutes without audio input. Using its companion app, you can also set it to shut off after five minutes, 20 minutes, 40 minutes, or one or three hours. You can also turn on/off this power-saving feature by pressing the volume-up and input buttons together.

The Bose SoundLink Color has poor voice assistant performance. It doesn't have any voice assistants built-in, so it uses the voice assistant of the device it's connected to. It's compatible with Google Assistant and Siri, but not with Alexa. Fortunately, it can understand you well even if you're far away or in a noisy room. However, you can't activate it with your voice, and there's no mic mute button to stop the speaker from listening to you.

The Bose Connect app is okay. It's compatible with iOS and Android devices, and you can pair two speakers together to create a stereo pair or amplify your audio content in a large room. However, there's no EQ, so you can't adjust its sound profile.

The Bose SoundLink Color has a 3.5mm AUX port that you can use to connect a device to play audio.

The Bose SoundLink Color II has an excellent Bluetooth performance. You can connect up to two devices at a time, and it has an outstanding range, so it will still receive audio input if you're far away. It has low Bluetooth latency with iOS and Android devices, making it suitable for watching videos. That said, some apps compensate for latency differently, so your experience may differ.

This speaker isn't Wi-Fi compatible.