A look at the colourful Braven 705

The Braven 705 is a great looking portable bluetooth speaker that has a couple of nice features you won’t always find other places. With a list of vibrant colours, it looks good, and with some great tech in the background it sounds good too.

This speaker costs £100, which is a lot of money, but as I mentioned before, it has some unique features. The three most prominent are the ability to charge another device, bluetooth audio passthrough, and IPX5 water resistant certification. The 705 will charge your phone or other usb device with up its 1400 mAh capacity, which isn’t a lot, but when your in a jam could charge 50% of your phone.

The bluetooth audio passthrough works with your home stereo or other device that has a 3.5mm audio input. This means that if the speaker doesn’t give you enough sound, you can plug it into your speaker system at home, and the Braven then works as a Bluetooth receiver.

Coming in at 6 inches wide, 3 inches tall, 2 inches deep, the Braven 705 is a very solid and well built. The speaker feels solid enough that I have thrown it into a backpack without fear of it cracking or breaking. The IPX5 water resistant rating means it’ll survive the kitchen or bathroom on the side, but can’t be chucked into a pool.

I found the battery life to be between 10 and 12 hours. It took me roughly 3 hours to charge it to full.  One feature I was unable to test was the ability for the Braven to pair two of their units together for true stereo sound and increased volume. this can be done with a couple of button pushes, and is a clever idea.

Controls are made simple with four large rubber buttons on the right side of the unit. Volume up, volume down, power on/off, and a play button that also functions as an answer/end call and pause and resume music. The buttons are multi-functional so you can hold the volume up or down buttons to go to the next or previous track.

The Braven 705 sounds great playing some Lacuna Coil and even listening to podcasts. I found it’s tone bright and clear. One trick I found was to place it in a corner or next to a wall to boost the bass. I didn’t get a single playback issue, and it played flawlessly. Testing the call quality, I found phone calls sounded good. Callers could hear me through the mic that is positioned on top of the speaker. If you’re looking for a stylish, colourful speaker that brings clarity and added functionality, the Braven 705 is a good one to go for.

You can grab the Braven 705 from http://www.braven.com/braven-705-wireless-bluetooth-speaker.html