Sonic Gear Pandora Mini Portable Bluetooth Speaker Review

2:45 PM pandora , review , sonic gear , speaker 2 Comments

REVIEW

      Taking the Pandora Mini out of its packaging, the rubber finish is definitely much more harder than that of the Pandora Micro. While it is certainly not smooth to the touch (I don't know why you would want to constantly touch it), it definitely provides more grip to the speakers itself which is a good thing I guess in case of accidental pushing and what not.
     Upon turning the unit to the back, I noticed the different I/O available to the Pandora Mini compared to the other two in the series. A USB 1A output, which deeply puzzled me. Did some further reading of what is printed on the packaging, apparently the Pandora Mini doubles as a power bank which sounds pretty cool, that is until you dig deeper to what kind of power bank it is.
     Unfortunately, the power bank functionality built into the power bank is a mere 1800mAh, which when put to scale, can only charge a modest Nexus 5 to 75% capacity, and a iPhone 5S for one full cycle. This pales in comparison to mobile power banks in the market by a lot.
     But I'm pretty sure that if you are a power user, you probably already have your own reliable power bank, an extra backup wouldn't hurt I guess. We might as well focus on what it functions well as, a portable speaker. Like the Pandora Micro, the Pandora Mini can produce loud volumes if you ever so need it. The Pandora Mini is able to surprisingly still produce some bass in music playback, albeit very weak. I never expected any portable speakers to be able to produce bass, which I am pleasantly surprised by the Mini.
     Let's go back to the fundamentals, the media controls of course. Like the Pandora 3, the Pandora Mini gives feedback when you actually click on the buttons, notifying you that you actually activated something. And as usual, this product features the normal forward, backward, volume up, volume down and answer call buttons as found across the Pandora series.
     The Pandora Mini has about the same range as the Pandora Micro which is about 20 meters. The Pandora Mini has another advantage over the Micro which is having a slightly longer battery life (6 hours) , but only by 1 hour which I guess is contributed by the built-in power bank.

CONCLUSION
     Simply put, there isn't much to say about the Pandora Mini while having reviewed the Pandora Micro and Pandora 3 without repeating myself over and over again. Sure the power bank feature is cool and all but does it justify the hefty RM210 price tag? Unfortunately having such a lackluster battery capacity for a power bank brings my verdict to -- No. Even without comparing it to other competing products, the Pandora Mini loses its value aspect to its smaller brother, the Pandora Micro.