Made substantially of plastic, iWalk’s Sound Angle ($130) offers most of what we’d expect from a Bluetooth speaker in this price range. Packed inside the triangular housing are two side-firing full-range speaker drivers and a passive bass radiator, while a pop-out stand on the front can hold iPads and iPhones. It’s a fine-looking speaker, but it won’t be confused with a premium option anytime soon. The unit comes packed with a micro-USB charging cable, and aux cable, and a velvety carrying bag.
Sound Angle’s base is about 5” deep, 10.5” long at the front, and 11” long at the back. The soft-touch coated plastic body feels rather hollow and looks kind of cheap — not bad, but not great, either. We found it to quickly attract fingerprints. It comes with a black, red, silver, or yellow core, surrounded by strips of white on either end. Here you’ll find metal buttons for playback, pairing, and volume control, plus a strip with blue LEDs indicating the remaining battery life and Bluetooth status. On the back there’s a power switch, aux port, and micro-USB charging port. Notably, our review sample arrived with black smudges on its plastic.
The sonic capabilities of Sound Angle match its aesthetics: not necessarily bad, but not great either. We found the overall audio profile to have little body, mostly attributable to lackluster bass performance. Compared to JBL’s Charge, a variation on the excellent Flip, which cost $100 and $150 respectively at the time of their reviews, the highs aren’t as clean. Sound Angle gets louder, but its high-end performance suffers when you turn it up. The speakerphone sounds good; our listener said we actually sounded less distant when compared to the iPhone in speaker mode.
In our testing, the main word that kept cropping up to describe Sound Angle is “fine.” It doesn’t wow in anyway, but it’s not a failure either. We can’t see any situation in which we’d recommend it over less expensive, more attractive, physically smaller, and better sounding alternatives though, earning it a C+ rating. There’s just nothing going on to differentiate the speaker from the millions of generic models on the market.
Our Rating
Company and Price
Company: iWalk
Website: http://www.iwalkusa.com/
Model: Sound Angle
Price: $130
Compatible: All Bluetooth-Equipped iPads, iPhones, iPods