Finding the Best Portable Speakers for iPod

If you are one of the 10s of millions of music lovers who owns an iPod or other digital music player, chances are you are usually listening to your favorite music through headphones - a personal and isolating experience. But there are plenty of times when it would actually serve you better to have a little speaker system to play your music out loud - whether it is because you are walking around your kitchen or hanging out with friends or sitting around with your family on vacation. Unfortunately, most MP3 players do not come with any built-in speakers (iPhone excepted), so you need to find some portable external speakers if you want to hear your music without headphones. Good news is, there are many different external iPod speaker systems and docking stations out there to get the music out of your headphones and into the air around you. In this review, we will take a look at a handy little speaker called the Vibez from iFrogz, best known for their iPod sleeves and accessories.

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What's a good speaker system for my iPod?

One complaint we have when it comes to finding a speaker system for your iPod is price - a lot of companies want you to pay as much or more for their speakers as you paid for your iPod! Come one - little tiny speakers don't cost $100+ to make. And if I wanted a huge home stereo system I would buy one. I'm just looking for a cheap, decent sounding little audio system I can carry with me when I want to. And that's exactly what the iFrogz Vibez offers. The Vibez is a little green expandable speaker unit. When closed, it looks like a little green egg, an inch tall by 2 inches wide. It has a mini USB port on one side, and on/off switch, and a LED indicator light on it -- very simple to use. It comes with a special cord that has a mini USB connector on it (for plugging into the Vibez), a normal sized USB connector (for connecting to your PC or laptop to power and charge the built-in battery inside the Vibez), and a standard audio-out jack plug to plug into the headphone jack of any MP3 music player. With a slight twist, the unit expands like an accordion by another 3/4 inch or so, standing up like a little column. This is the open speaker position, and you can close it with a squeeze and a twist when you are done using it. The OFF/Volume switch is on the bottom, with two different settings for volume level. And that's really all there is to it in terms of how it works - charge it, connect it to your iPod, and start listening to music.

Once charged, you can carry the Vibez around with you and play it right off your iPod with no other power cables or bulky AC adapters to worry about - a very nice feature since most of the other speaker sets we have seen have separate AC audio cables and adapters, meaning yet another set of incompatible cords to carry around. None of that with the Vibez - small, compact, and convenient. The charge on the Vibez lasts for a long time. We had charged it at home when we first got it, then took it on vacation with us and hooked it up to our iPhone, laptop, and MP3 player at various times over the next week to crank out some tunes, and we were beginning to think it was somehow magically powered just through the audio jack cord when it finally started to conk-out on us, reminding us to charge it again from the laptop USB port.

So how does it sound?

So the real question is, how does the Vibez sound? Overall, I will say we were impressed. We have two other portable speaker systems we use at home to turn our iPods into stereos -- these speakers need to be larger and powered to fill entire large areas with loud music, and the Vibez doesn't attempt to match this performance. But my wife has gotten in the habit of playing music off her laptop speakers in the kitchen, and this little Vibez blows the pants off that laptop. The sound coming out of the Vibez is at least twice as loud as the laptop speakers, and much richer and clearer. It works great for my kids as well, letting them turn their bedroom into a mini concert hall -- and I think most of us parents would rather our kids listen to music out loud instead of with earphones blasting away at their little ears and potentially causing hearing damage. So for kids and teens who need a cheap, decent sounding speaker system for listening to music with friends, this is a great option. And for anyone who wants an inexpensive, compact, portable speaker system, the Vibez is a great choice. If you're used to the tinny sounds coming from your laptop, give one of these a try - you will be impressed what $25 can do for your audio experience! Overall we rate it a 9 out of 10 -- we'd always love a little more volume and bass, but the laws of physics and acoustics only allow so much, and the Vibez really maximizes what you can do with a tiny speaker system. Good work guys! You can buy it directly from their website, iFrogz.com.

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