A drummer I know brought in his Christmas present into the office and it blew me away. It was the Bose SoundLink Mini Bluetooth speaker. As soon as I saw and heard it, I knew I wanted one.

Being a musician, I rather shockingly don’t have any decent speakers through which to play music at home. I have a home theatre system and an okay bluetooth speaker by Blaupunkt, but neither of them truly cut it in terms of sound quality.

Thanks to my awesome Grandmother, I was today the recipient of the same speaker as my drummer friend. The first thing you need to know is that its small size is no indication whatsoever of its power. And my power I mean bass. For a speaker that’s the size of a couple of squished VHS tapes or the Star Trek movie Bluray box set (odd comparisons I know), this speaker can easily fill a room with such a warm sound with very good bass response. It sounds better than a lot of consumer Hi-fi systems that I have heard.

The build quality for the speaker itself is excellent. The whole thing is metal with rubberised buttons and a soft panel underneath to stop it from moving. It’s relatively heavy as a result, but not enough to put any serious strain on your bag. The battery life is around 7 hours and can be charged by plugging in the power adapter straight into the speaker, or by using the cradle which comes with the speaker.

The cradle is pretty cool as it almost resembles a wireless charger although technically speaking it isn’t. When using the cradle, the speaker sits neatly on top and charges without any manoeuvring or clicking into place. You can still use the speaker whilst charging which is very convenient. The only downside is that the speaker doesn’t support USB charging so you will have to take the power adapter with you if you were going on an extended trip.

I’m considering using this in my car too as my car stereo doesn’t support bluetooth and can’t be swapped out for a better one. A car adapter can be bought to charge the speaker if you want to do this. Finally there are some soft cases available if you wanted to personalise your speaker a bit, although at the moment only three colours are available.

I’ve tested this speaker with a range of Bluetooth devices including the iPhone, iPad, MacBook Pro, Android phone and a Kindle Fire HD. All these devices connect to the speaker quickly and easily.

To sum up, this is a great speaker – one of the best I’ve owned. At £169 it’s a somewhat luxury purchase, but with Bose you know you are getting something of supreme quality. I can’t stress enough how incredible it is to see a speaker of this size produce such a wonderful sound.

You can pick one of these up from Amazon along with the cases and accessories.