Made substantially of plastic, iWalk’s Sound Angle ($130) offers most of what we’d expect from a Bluetooth speaker in this price range. Packed inside the triangular housing are two side-firing full-range speaker drivers and a passive bass radiator, while a pop-out stand on the front can hold iPads and iPhones. It’s a fine-looking speaker, but it won’t be confused with a premium option anytime soon. The unit comes packed with a micro-USB charging cable, and aux cable, and a velvety carrying bag.
Sound Angle’s base is about 5” deep, 10.5” long at the front, and 11” long at the back.
The soft-touch coated plastic body feels rather hollow and looks kind of cheap — not bad, but not great, either. We found it to quickly attract fingerprints. It comes with a black, red, silver, or yellow core, surrounded by strips of white on either end. Here you’ll find metal buttons for playback, pairing, and volume control, plus a strip with blue LEDs indicating the remaining battery life and Bluetooth status. On the back there’s a power switch, aux port, and micro-USB charging port.
Notably, our review sample arrived with black smudges on its plastic.
The sonic capabilities of Sound Angle match its aesthetics: not necessarily bad, but not great either. We found the overall audio profile to have little body, mostly attributable to lackluster bass performance. Compared to JBL’s Charge, a variation on the excellent Flip, which cost $100 and $150 respectively at the time of their reviews, the highs aren’t as clean. Sound Angle gets louder, but its high-end performance suffers when you turn it up. The speakerphone sounds good; our listener said we actually sounded less distant when compared to the iPhone in speaker mode.
