You may already be familiar with the name X-Mini, but if you’re not then let us fill you in. The X-Mini name represents a range of tiny yet very powerful portable speakers, manufactured by the company Xmi Pte. The speakers offer ‘put it in your pocket’ portability thanks to their diminutive size, simple connectivity using a short 3.5mm jack cable and booming sound with an extendable bass chamber.
I’m an avid user of the X-Mini II – another speaker in the range – that has been hugely popular thanks to an incredible price tag of around £15 and an impressive sound performance. The speaker has won many coveted awards ranging from the Universal Design Awards to T3’s Gold Label.
I love my X-Mini II, but what if you want to make your speaker even more portable? That’s where the X-Mini KAI comes in, offering both wired and wireless connectivity thanks to a Bluetooth chip.
Same great design with new features
The X-Mini KAI features the same rounded design as its predecessor the X-Mini II, looking very neat and compact when folded down for storage. Give the top half a slight twist and the two halves expand to make the speaker twice as tall, thus providing a ‘chamber’ inside the speaker which really gives it a bassy oomph.
In the box you’ll get a soft black carry pouch and a Mini USB and 3.5mm splitter cable, which charges the device and also allows you to connect it to another X-Mini speaker to create a daisy chain effect.
The top half of the speaker features a small silver cone beneath the X-Mini logo which is etched out of a bridge of black plastic that runs over the top. Beneath the X-Mini logo is the product’s tagline; ‘Sound Beyond Size’. On the side of the top half is a small plastic loop with which you can attach a lanyard or cord, so the speaker can be hung up somewhere if necessary.
All the Bluetooth tech has been crammed into the bottom half of the speaker, and naturally it is slightly larger than the same section on the X-Mini II, but not by much. There are a host of buttons and controls in order to help you control the Bluetooth playback from the speaker itself, which is handy if you’ve left your phone or MP3 player lying around and taken the speaker with you.
A simple scroll wheel allows you to skip back and forward through your songs simply by scrolling it left or right respectively. The same wheel can be clicked in to pause and continue music playback, or to answer and end calls when the speaker is paired with a mobile phone. We think it’s pretty neat that this little speaker can act as a (very loud) hands-free kit for your phone, playing your call audio with good clarity and a loud volume, as well as sending your voice via the inbuilt microphone.
Also located around the base of the speaker are a simple click mute button and a slide switch which puts the speaker into regular audio mode (for use with the 3.5mm cable), on and into Bluetooth pairing mode. There’s a Mini USB port for charging via the mains or by PC, plus a 3.5mm audio socket which can be used to connect more than one of these speakers together. When you hook up two of these things, things start getting really loud, it’s really quite impressive.
Pairing is really simple with the X-Mini KAI – just flick the three way switch towards the Bluetooth logo for a few seconds and then back to the centre position, wait for the name ‘X-Mini KAI’ to appear on your Bluetooth device, choose to connect to it and enter the passcode as ‘0000’ if prompted.
Flip the X-Mini KAI over and you’ll find a short 3.5mm AUX cable neatly coiled away into the base. As an alternative to using Bluetooth you can simply slot this into virtually any device with a 3.5mm socket, switch the speaker to audio and away you go.
Tiny and loud without the wires
Thanks to the 40mm driver and extendable chamber, the KAI is capable of producing a mighty loud sound. The tagline of ‘sound beyond size’ really comes to light when you first use the tiny speaker with the volume cranked up, with the deep and punchy bass putting a surprised look on most who experience it. You need to ensure you keep the volume of your connected device and the KAI in balance, as we found that if you crank both up to full volume, the bass causes the little speaker to bounce and vibrate across the surface that you put it on.
Unfortunately we felt that the bass was a little too much and on louder volumes caused distortion and sometimes even overshadowed other elements of a song. However, bearing in mind the diminutive size of the speaker and the fact that it is designed to be portable, this is something we have overlooked. The X-Mini KAI can easily fill a small to moderately sized room with sound, and is absolutely perfect for situations like camping, picnics or just playing some music in your bedroom.
You can charge the speaker up via USB in 2.5 hours, or if you have a mains USB adapter it will charge even quicker. You get an impressive 8 hours (we got slightly more) from that 2.5 hour charge, which we felt was very decent given the Bluetooth functionality which is normally known for draining batteries.
Overall the X-Mini KAI is the perfect portable speaker, with Bluetooth adding the convenience of cable-free sound on the go. The price tag of £70 may seem a little pricey, but when you consider that you can use this little beauty as a hands-free kit for your mobile phone, it’s actually quite reasonable.
If you’re looking for a lot of sound balanced with a small and very portable speaker, then look no further than the X-Mini KAI. If the price is too high for you then perhaps consider the Bluetooth-free X-Mini 2.
The X-Mini KAI was supplied for this review by Advanced Mp3 Players, and is available now for £69 from their site here.
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Tags: 2, Advanced, bluetooth, KAI, Mini, MP3 player, Portable, Review, Speaker, X-Mini
