The beat goes on

A bluetooth wireless speaker system with a compact and portable body, the Big Jambox has a very big and impressive sound.

It may measure just 25.6 cm long, 8 cm wide and 9.3 cm high and weigh a mere 1.2 kgs but it filled my large living room with powerful, clear and beautiful sounds.

The San Francisco-based Jawbone designed the Big Jambox as a one-piece compact seamless piece with big control buttons as a wireless speaker system that you can move around conveniently from your computer desk to your kitchen and the bathroom.

The Big Jambox is a larger and better version of Jambox, which Jawbone introduced in 2010.

It can be up to 10 metres from the Bluetooth device - a laptop, phone, tablet or MP3 player - when streaming music via the Bluetooth connection. And with just two-and-a-half-hours needed to recharge, the Big Jambox’s lithium-ion battery can deliver up to 15 hours of continuous playback, meaning you can carry it in your bag to share the music outdoors or anywhere else.

The Big Jambox has built-in media controls that allow you to navigate music from the speaker system away from your device. The top part features a Talk button for picking up calls when it is connected to your smart phone. There are also buttons for play/pause, previous, next, volume up and volume down.

You can use the Big Jambox as a speaker phone thanks to the built-in 360-degree echo-cancelling microphone that allows you to share conference calls with others. It supports Skype, Google TalkTM and FaceTime chat.

Bluetooth pairing with Big Jambox was a breeze during the test. When the Big Jambox is powered on, it is automatically in a pairing mode and you can then turn on the Bluetooth connection of your smart phone. Your smart phone will then search and find the name of Big Jambox for pairing.

Once your smart phone has been paired with Big Jambox, it will automatically connect to the wireless speaker system the next time when you turn on Big Jambox and your phone’s Bluetooth connection.

Big Jambox can remember up to 8 paired devices and its simultaneous multipoint allows Big Jambox to connect to two Bluetooth devices at once. There is also a pairing button on the right side of the Big Jambox that lets you manually set the Big Jambox in the pairing mode.

I paired my Motorola RAZR Maxx and HTC Windows Phone 8X as well as an iPad to Big Jambox – it was a breeze.

I was impressed by the music quality considering the system’s compact size. Vocals and instrument sounds were loud and clear. The bass wasn’t as deep as with full-size speakers, but certainly powerful enough to enjoy rock.

During the test, I enjoyed listening to AC/DC’s “Black Ice” album followed by sweet saxophone sounds on the “Beautiful Night – Sax for Sex” album. The “Voices V” album also played beautifully on the Big Jambox with clear vocals and clear musical instruments.

The Jawbone says the Big Jambox delivers good music quality because it uses built-in LiveAudio technology for delivering an immersive 3D listening experience.

It adds that Big Jambox has been engineered to bring good audio performance with two proprietary active drivers and two opposing passive bass radiators. The bass radiators can create huge bass despite the compact size. The system also comes with precisely tuned equalisation for balancing audio playback and its loudness compensation algorithm automatically adjusts the highs and lows to adjust sound quality at all volume levels.

The Big Jambox is designed to be updated with new technology when Jawbone releases the update firmware. You use the USB port to connect to your computer to update using the Jawbone Updater software.

You can also download and install the Jawbone Companion for Android on your Android smart phone. The app lets Big Jambox announce calendar events, enables one-touch dial-in for conference calls, and displays a convenient battery indicator on your phone.

Big Jambox comes in three designs (Red Dot, White Weave and Grahite Hex) and is available for Bt15,500 at King Power, iStudio, iBeat, Dot Life, Jaymart, Power Mall, and C-nex