Key Takeaways
- The Ultimate Ears Miniroll is great for personal use indoors but less effective in outdoor settings.
- Durable strap for hanging or carrying, customizable and removable.
- Multiple speaker connectivity for UE only and lacks a microphone.
Ultimate Ears has (sort of) resurrected its Roll speakers in the form of the new UE Miniroll. The new Bluetooth speaker is petite with 12 hours of battery, a strap, and PartyUp mode for multiple speaker connections. It’s a perfectly portable speaker; just don’t expect the world from it.
Ultimate Ears Miniroll
The UE Miniroll is a durable, compact speaker with a crisp sound. A strap lets you take your music along for the ride.
- Small portable size
- Loud volume
- Flexible strap
- Auracast not cross-brand compatible
- Volume buttons easy to accidentally press when grabbing it
Price and Availability
The UE Miniroll retails for $79.99 and comes in several different color options.
How Does a Hockey Puck-Sized Speaker Sound?
The primary inquiry about this product and its ultimate fate rests on how it sounds. It’s great that the Miniroll is tiny enough to fit in the palm of most people’s hands, but it’s not worth buying if it doesn’t produce decent audio quality.
Luckily, the Miniroll is a perfect, intimate Bluetooth speaker. This means that it works great in cozy environments. Places like a bedroom, office cubicle, on a patio, or areas with only a few people are ideal. The company recommends it for one to five people.
The speaker can omit a fairly loud volume, especially when I compared it to the similarly small Sony XB100, but that’s not when it’s at its best. That’s likely thanks to its 45.6mm active driver plus passive radiator. Still, keeping the volume at or under 50% helps it have the richest sound.
Beyond using it on a bathroom counter while you get ready in the morning or on a nightstand for sleeping sounds, the Miniroll is an ideal size for travel. So how does it sound outside while hiking or playing at the park?
In short, my outdoor results were mixed. It was loud enough to use when my son and I played wiffle ball at the park, but the audio quality was stretched to its limits outside. There wasn’t much low-end bass to speak of. The speaker also didn’t sound as rich and full as it did when using it inside, in a smaller space.
To be clear, this is what you should expect from smaller-sized speakers. Compared to the latest LG XBoom Go, the Miniroll held its own. Certainly the UE Miniroll sounds better than I would have guessed, strictly based on its size, but it still has well-defined capabilities.
If the best camera is the one you have with you, then the same might be true for a Bluetooth speaker as well. If the choice is between blasting music directly out of your phone’s speaker or the Miniroll, I’ll take this speaker every time.
As a heads-up, there’s no microphone; it is just a small speaker. I doubt most people would expect that feature, but it’s definitely not a portable speakerphone. This is primarily made for music.
A Small Size and a Strap Make it Versatile
The UE Miniroll is the smallest speaker the company currently sells, undercutting the Wonderboom 4 (or Wonderboom 3) by just a bit. Speaking of size, the Miniroll is very much a spiritual successor to the UE Roll product line. While those products had a bungee cord attachment, the Miniroll has a rubber strap. But otherwise, it’s very similar just even more compact.
The strap is connected at the bottom via a metal screw and slots into a hole at the top of the speaker. It can stretch from 20mm to 35mm, so around a bike handle or a thin iron rod fence amount of distance. It couldn’t fit around my wrist though, to give you an idea of its elasticity.
The strap doesn’t have to completely wrap around something, however. It can swivel and hang from a hook too. If you don’t want the strap at all that’s removable too. Although I hardly found places I wanted to use the strap naturally, I never found myself wanting to get rid of it. But it can be removed if it does get in the way.
It might not be the most mainstream feature, but the Miniroll can connect to other UE speakers with its Party Up mode. The company says this is powered by Auracast, the new Bluetooth spec meant to connect multiple devices together wirelessly.
If you hold the play button on the Miniroll for three seconds it puts it into connection mode and doing the same on another capable speaker links them. You can play music from your phone, for example, to multiple speakers for a larger sound.
Auracast is meant to work across brands and connect any supported speakers together, but that’s not the case here. I tried to connect the Miniroll to an Auracast-enabled JBL speaker and they wouldn’t link up. I was told by the company that the feature would need another Miniroll speaker to function. It could still be a useful feature, but I would probably opt for a different Bluetooth speaker before spending $160 on two Minirolls. I might suggest looking at the new UE Everboom.
The Miniroll has a rated battery life of 12 hours. That’s more than the Sonos Roam and great for a speaker its size. I found that estimate to be close in my varied uses of it. There’s no USB-C cable in the box which is a shame, but also not a dealbreaker.
Should You Buy the Ultimate Ears Miniroll?
Although you’ll sacrifice some bass and richness, the Ultimate Ears Miniroll is an ideal size to bring along anywhere. It’s almost pocketable in a pair of pants, but will for sure fit in nearly every type of bag. It’s the kind of speaker you buy when you don’t know exactly where you’ll use it, but you know you want to travel with a speaker.
There are quite a few small Bluetooth speakers out there to choose from, but few that sound this large in such a small package. If portability is your main goal, this is the speaker for you. For everyone else, I would wait until you can find it on sale, lower than its $80 retail price.
Ultimate Ears Miniroll
The UE Miniroll is a durable, compact speaker with a crisp sound. A strap lets you take your music along for the ride.
