Ultimate Ears' UE Boom was an excellent $200 Bluetooth speaker, and even two years after its release, it's still a solid choice if you want a rugged, portable way to share your music wirelessly. Now Ultimate Ears offers a bigger version of the Boom. The UE Megaboom is beefier, more powerful, and louder than the UE Boom, and at $299.99 it's also $100 more expensive. It's a very good portable speaker if you want to blast sound through a room without any wires, but it struggles with deep bass at top volumes. If you can spend $50 more, the Editors' Choice Bowers & Wilkins T7 offers superior audio performance, but the Megaboom is a solid choice for the price. Just don't try to blow it out with thumpy dance music.

Design

The Megaboom is a faithful upscaling of the UE Boom. It's a rugged rubber cylinder that measures a tall 8.9 inches and is 3.5 inches in diameter. It's available in black, electric blue, red, or purple, and is covered almost entirely on the curved side with a cloth grille. The speaker is both shockproof and IPX7 waterproof, so you can drop it and soak it with relative impunity. Placed on a flat surface, it looks identical to the smaller Boom, with a large rubber strip running the length of the speaker holding the volume controls, and the rubber top housing the Power and Bluetooth pairing buttons and indicator lights.

Its design only differs from the original UE Boom when you turn it over and look at the bottom panel. The handy D-ring is still there if you want to hang it up or clip it to your bag, but the micro USB (for charging) and 3.5mm ports are now covered by dedicated rubber doors built into the speaker body instead of by a thin rubber strip you have to thread around the D-ring like on the smaller speaker. This protects the ports more than the Boom, but it also recesses the micro USB port deep in the speaker. You should hang on to the included cable for its square head, which reaches far enough to connect; you can't count on just any cable to fit.

While the Megaboom doesn't have many controls on its own, you can make advanced adjustments with the free UE Megaboom app for iOS and Android. It lets you pair two Megabooms for a stereo setup, use a handful of equalizer presets, or manually adjust a five-band equalizer, and even turn the speaker on and off.