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Some products are honest about being small and this is one of them. The Sony SRS-XB100 weighs about 274 grams, costs around fifty dollars, and comes with a strap so you can hang it off a shower rail or a rucksack. IP67 means dust-tight and submersible to a metre. Battery is rated at 16 hours, Bluetooth 5.3 with Google Fast Pair, and you can pair two of them for stereo. Inside there’s a single upward-firing full-range driver with a passive radiator helping the low end along. It’s built partly from recycled materials.
For something this size the sound is genuinely decent, with more body in the mids and bass than the dimensions suggest. It’s consistently impressive for its footprint. The compromises are real though and worth naming: the treble is muddy, deep bass is essentially absent, and you can hear compression kick in when you turn it up. It lands around 7.5 out of 10: a cheap Bluetooth speaker with good sound and too few features. That’s a fair summary. Inside a bathroom it sounds great. In a backyard it vanishes.
Portability and battery are what you’re buying, and both deliver. Mine goes weeks between charges. Real-world use ran close to Sony’s 16-hour claim, meaning a week of showers between charges, and the strap plus the weight make it genuinely grab-and-go. It’s tough enough for the beach and the shower without a thought. Two annoyances. Charging takes about four and a half hours with no fast-charge option, which is slow for something this small. And the microphone for hands-free calling is mediocre, so treat the speakerphone as a bonus rather than a feature.
Bluetooth 5.3 with Google Fast Pair means an Android phone connects the moment you open the case. There’s no multipoint though, so it’s one device at a time. Sony’s Music Center app is almost pointless here, offering little beyond a battery readout and firmware updates, with no EQ to speak of. Stereo pairing with a second XB100 works and is the cheapest way to make it sound bigger. Charging is USB-C.
Get one for the shower, the kitchen, a tent, a desk, or a bag you take everywhere, where small and tough and all-day battery beat volume. It does that job about as well as anything at fifty dollars. Skip it if you need to fill a room or a garden, because it will simply run out of air. The JBL Go 4 and the JBL Clip 5 are the obvious alternatives at similar money, and Sony’s own ULT Field range if you want actual volume. This one knows exactly what it is.
Pros
• Genuinely good sound for something this tiny
• About 16 hours, so weeks between charges in the shower
• IP67 and 274g with a carrying strap
• Google Fast Pair makes Android setup instant
Cons
• Not loud enough for a room or a backyard
• Muddy treble and effectively no deep bass
• Four and a half hours to charge, no fast option
• App is nearly featureless, and there’s no multipoint
Our score: 7.2/10
