Review of Sony Ericsson’s MBS-100 stereo Bluetooth speaker ball
Sony Ericsson’s MBS-100 is a portable Bluetooth speaker system. It can be used with a mobile phone or laptop computer to provide a better music experience than most such devices could do on there own, which makes it great for taking to the park or sitting on your office desk. While fairly small, at 100mm x 100mm x 90mm (3.9″ x 3.9″ x 3.5″), it still weighs a hefty 225g (7.9oz) in spite of the fact that its battery is only good for about 5 hours of Bluetooth stereo playback. The MBS-100 can be used with other devices when linked up to a 3.5mm headphone cable, though, which would probably extend the battery life quite a bit.
The MBS-100 speaker ball is pretty easy to operate, since there are only two buttons - both of which are found on the bottom of the device. One button is used to turn it on and off (as indicated by a multi-color LED on its front), and the other throws it into pairing mode so that it can be hooked up with a phone or computer. For the record, the Sony Ericsson charger connection is also located on the bottom.
Once hooked up to a phone or laptop (we used both), the MBS-100 works fine. Audio quality is pretty decent for a portable speaker system, with more bass than you might expect. It should be no surprise that there isn’t a lot of stereo separation with the MBS-100, but few are probably expecting ultra-high quality audio from such a device. The only real problem I have with it is volume. Since there is no volume control on the device, the volume levels are handled by the audio source device - your laptop of phone. The audio levels were OK for playing in the background or in a desk cubical, but they really weren’t adequate for much more than that. We watched a movie on my laptop using the MBS-100 and consistently wanted more volume. But no matter how much we wanted it, there was no more volume to be had.
In the end, the Sony Ericsson MBS-100 is less than perfect. A volume control would have been nice, for starters. More battery life would have been great, too. But for a device that sells for roughly $75 to $90, it isn’t too bad. And when compared with Motorola’s smaller, and more feature rich EQ5, the MBS-100 manages to provide much fuller sounding audio.
It’s not a great product, but it’s a good product, and one that I will use occasionally.
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