Aidan Cotter

Recently I purchased a snazzy new net book for college. A lot of people out there hate the idea of a net book, but I needed something uber portable and with a half decent battery. In the end I bought a Toshiba NB200, Windows 7, 1GB of RAM, 250GB Hard Drive and an Intel Atom Processor (clock speed of around 1.66GHz) good specs for a net book methinks! The best thing about this baby is that it has a 9 hour battery life, which suits me as I don’t have to cart around a charger in college.

The only thing letting this puppy down was its built in speaker…well it’s to be expected I suppose. This sent me on the hunt for a set of speakers, but these speakers would have to be just as portable as the net book. After an age of trawling through google and YouTube I came across the X-mini 2, the reviews were excellent…5 stars, 10 out of 10′s and they also won a reddot design award. I must have viewed 20+ videos to get an idea of the sound quality, in the end it was this video that sealed it for me. I took the plunge and bought off eBay, a little dearer than amazon.co.uk but the postage was promised quicker and I’m impatient when it comes to gadgets .

At first I was surprised at its size, it fitted neatly into the palm of my hand. The X-mini also felt sturdy and well built, which is handy as I have a tendency to drop things. The best was yet to come, it wasn’t until I plugged the X-mini into my net book that I was literally blown away by the sound…well not literally but it was highly impressive. The bass from this little beauty was spot on, treble was also perfect and at full volume there was no distortion or hissing. Another speciality of this pocket sized boom-box is its ‘buddy-jack’ feature, if you happen to be a lucky guy or gal and have more than one X-mini, you can daisy chain them for extra ear bleeding volume. The speaker charges through USB and will give you roughly 12 hours playback time, exceptional for anyone on the go.

Check out my pictures  below to get an idea of the size and quality. And that’s it what more can I say…if you are in dire need of a portable speaker that packs a punch or even if you’re looking to spend some money on a shiny new gadget, go out and get an X-mini 2!