Gadgetory

I'm David Carnot executive editor cnet.com and I'm here with these sony SRS @bt X 540 Bluetooth speaker this is the flagship portable Bluetooth speaker in Sony's lineup for 2013 and it is a very good model as you can see it is sleek it is well designed it's a fairly hefty unit it weighs around four pounds and around $300 it competes directly with the bose soundlink bluetooth mobile speaker 2 as well as the big Jambox what I liked about it is that it offers clean sound also pretty big sound it doesn't over accentuate the bass too much but there is ample bass this delivers impressive sound for a compact bluetooth speaker and yes as I said it is portable it has a rechargeable battery inside it delivers about 6 hours of battery life that's not great you can do better than that if you lower the volume a bit but you should be able to get through a good portion of the day with that battery life another nice feature is that it has a USB port in the back so when you do have the AC adapter plugged in you can charge other devices such as smartphones while you have this on a couple of other features worth noting this does have built-in speakerphone capabilities there's a button on top of the unit for answering calls there's also volume controls and a few buttons on the side but it does have a pretty minimalist design and you basically are expected to use your smart phone or tablet as a remote and there is an exhilarating put for devices that aren't Bluetooth enabled this also has another sort of hot feature of the moment that is NFC pairing NFC is a feature that's available in some smart phones this allows you to tap to pair your device but it doesn't make pairing that much easier and you do have to download a special app to make it work but the feature did work when I try the NFC pairing and you can also disconnect by tapping on the speaker with your smart phone well the speaker will certainly fit in a suitcase and it does come with a carrying case it is a nice neoprene carrying case so one necessarily say this is the best speaker to take with you in a bag on an airplane for a longer trip the BT X 300 might be a little bit better than that although this does offer bigger and richer sound than that speaker does and I would recommend this speaker over that smaller speaker because of that sound and all in all I really did like it a lot and it certainly does compete well with the Bose and big jambox and should be on your shortlist for portable bluetooth speakers I'm David karna and that's the sony srs BT X 500 thanks for watching