Big (Enough) Sound With Some Neat Features

The Ultimate Ears Everboom is a great speaker, but even with some nice features like IP67 and a 360-degree design, it doesn’t necessarily stand out from the crowd. Its big volume buttons remain iconic and it’s a solid choice if you’re partial to UE, but it’s hardly unique or the only good choice.

Ultimate Ears Everboom

The Everboom portable Bluetooth speaker has a 360-degree sound with customizable EQ. Keep the party going with 20 hours of battery life. With the IP67 waterproof, dustproof, and floatable design, the Everboom was practically born to be an outdoor speaker.

Pros

• Loud volume for its size
• NFC pairing
• Outdoor boost helps fill out the sound
• Plenty of battery life

Cons

• Premium price compared to some competitors
• Can’t use as a power bank
• A bit too big to be ultra portable

Price and Availability

The UE Everboom is available now and retails for $249. It’s one of many “boom” speakers in the company’s lineup. It comes with a USB cable and a carabiner clip in the box.

The Differentiators Are In the Details

The UE Everboom has a big sound and a compact frame, but so do plenty of other Bluetooth speakers. Rather, this music maker tries to differentiate itself based on a few of its finer details. It can pair to an Android phone with a tap to its embedded NFC chip, for example.

The speaker has a customizable button that can start playing any selected Apple Music or Amazon Music playlist you assign to it. (Hold the play button for 3 seconds.) That was handy and worked surprisingly well. The speaker also has a 360-degree design so the audio should sound the same from the front or back, no matter how you set it down on a table.

Talking about minor features, there is the ability to use the speaker as a “megaphone” from the mobile app. Pressing the button in the mobile app will let you talk into your phone and play it out of the speaker. I tried the megaphone and liked it, but I didn’t find a natural use for it in the several weeks I had the speaker. I can imagine a few random scenarios at parties where it might be useful, but you probably shouldn’t buy the speaker only for that ability.

Even more niche might be the ability to pair multiple UE speakers together to create a larger sound. It’s not hard to do. I’ve tried it in the past, but it’s advanced in that I’m torn about whether most people even care about this. It requires buying multiple compatible speakers and fussing with them a bit.

The Everboom has an IP67 water and dust rating (including a floatable design) that should be enough to keep this speaker safe from the elements when venturing outside. Its 20-hour battery life is also a reasonable amount for the speaker’s minimal size.

It shouldn’t be worth mentioning, but UE is finally adding a USB-C charging port on its newest speakers. So a modern cable, the same one you might charge your phone or laptop with, can also power this device.

The Everboom Can Go Boom

Boom isn’t the main draw of this particular speaker in the UE lineup, but the Everboom does have a legitimate claim to its name with a boomy enough sound for its size. The physical context is key because it won’t rumble your house, but it could rattle a small bedroom. The volume from the speaker does a good job of filling out the low-end frequency compared to some of the lower-cost, off-brand models.

Mostly, I would call the speaker’s sound “meaty.” Its mids are clear enough, but I never thought the speaker had a sparkling or shimmering sound. I had no issues listening to a variety of genres but alternative rock played the best.

While the Everboom will sound full indoors on its default sound settings, the extra boost, or oomph, from its Outdoor Boost button helps its presence in places without walls.

I used the default “signature” EQ most of the time because it worked the best for all types of music. The multiple EQ settings are not particularly notable, but I do like how the company labels the different sound profiles with practical names like, “cramped spaces,” “podcast” and “deep relaxation.”

For sound tests, I compared the $250 Everboom directly to the $400 Bose SoundLink Max and the $150 Beats Pill to get a sense of its price-to-sound ratio. Maybe I shouldn’t have been surprised, but the Everboom fell somewhere in the middle between the two other Bluetooth speakers.

The Beats Pill doesn’t quite have the fullness of the Everboom, despite packing impressive low-end capabilities. The Everboom could get louder with a more even sound. On the more expensive end, the SoundLink Max had more bass and more brilliance in a size that wasn’t too much bigger. Of course, the $300 Epicboom is probably a better comparison to the Bose speaker.

Should You Buy Ultimate Ears Everboom?

The Ultimate Ears Everboom speaker is a solid product, on its own, in a vacuum. There’s nothing confusing about its boastful sound or its fun (and functional) design. It does a good job of cramming a lot into a portable size.

The most confusing aspect is whether the Everboom is the right Bluetooth speaker for you, compared to all the other Ultimate Ears choices. There’s the Megaboom 4 at $200, the Everboom at $250, and the Epicboom at $300, among others. When any of those are on sale, the choice becomes a lot harder.

Price aside, the Everboom is good for moving around the house, and backyard, and can easily be packed in a car. It won’t give you the biggest sound but it can be brought along to a lot of places. It’s a middle-of-the-road Bluetooth speaker. For bigger gatherings or ultra-compact needs, I would look elsewhere.

Ultimate Ears Everboom

The Everboom portable Bluetooth speaker has a 360-degree sound with customizable EQ. Keep the party going with 20 hours of battery life. With the IP67 waterproof, dustproof, and floatable design, the Everboom was practically born to be an outdoor speaker.