the speaker that lives in my water bottle pocket

At 4pm on a Saturday my friend Dana K. texted "are you bringing the good speaker" and I was already out the door with a speaker in one hand, a bag of ice in the other, and exactly zero cables. The bonfire went six hours. The speaker went the whole time and then made it home and finished the dishes playlist with me at midnight, damp from sitting too close to somebody's cider, completely fine about it.

Here's the part where I confess I paid full price for it, like a rookie, in front of everyone.

the honest bit, with receipts

The feelings part: I have written on this site about waiting for a sale like it's a hobby, and then I walked into a store, held a one pound speaker in a color I can only describe as sage adjacent, and paid the full $179 like a person in a commercial. I've made my peace. Mostly.

the six things that earned the backpack slot

It is actually small. About 6.6 inches tall, under a pound, shaped like a rounded brick that slots into a bottle pocket, a cup holder, or the side of a tote bag with room left for the novel I keep pretending I'll finish. My old portable speaker lived on a shelf because carrying it required a dedicated bag decision. This one just goes. The size is the feature and the feature is undefeated.

Wi-Fi at home, Bluetooth everywhere else, one button between them. At home it rides my Wi-Fi and behaves like part of the Sonos family, synced with the soundbar I already own, AirPlay 2 from any apple device in the room. On the porch or at a park it flips to Bluetooth with a dedicated pairing button, which is the one thing the first Roam was missing, and reviewers made a point of celebrating it. White light means Wi-Fi, blue means Bluetooth, and the switch takes one press and no app. After a year of doing Bluetooth dances with a previous speaker, one press feels like a luxury yacht.

The sound is warm and bigger than it has any right to be. Automatic Trueplay tunes it to wherever it's sitting, on a picnic table, a bookshelf, a rock that I chose for its acoustic properties like a person with a diploma in rocks. It's balanced and easy to listen to rather than thumping, which reviewers consistently noted, and it fills a backyard comfortably. It will not shake a room the way a big speaker does. That's not its job. Its job is to be the sound at the thing you're actually doing.

The battery is ten hours of rated honesty. Sonos claims 10 hours at moderate volume and I got something close to nine at backyard volume, which is better than the reputation the first Roam earned, since the original's battery flaking out was the famous complaint. When it does run down, it charges over USB-C or drops onto any Qi pad, so mine refuels on the same puck as my phone like a small, musical sibling. Two chargers is one fewer thing to think about, and I will take every fewer thing I can get.

IP67 means I stopped protecting it. Dustproof, waterproof enough to survive a dunk in a meter of water, drop resistant enough that it has already survived a tumble off a picnic table onto gravel, an event I witnessed and avenge no one. A tester took one to the beach on purpose and came home recommending it, which tracks with everything I've put mine through, mostly accidentally. It's the first speaker I own that I don't baby, and not babying a thing turns out to be most of the fun of owning it.

Now the honest complaints. At max volume it gets loud, not loud loud, and several owners say the same thing: it could use one more notch. Alexa only works over Wi-Fi, there's no Google Assistant anymore at all, and at $179 it costs a chunk more than perfectly good waterproof rivals. I paid the Sonos tax knowingly, because mine slots into a system I already run, but if you're starting from zero with one small speaker in mind, the math deserves a minute.

the logo tangent 🎨

Small thing I need to talk about: the logo on the front is printed in the same color as the speaker itself. On the first Roam the logo was always white, which made every color look like a costume with the same name tag. On the Roam 2 the wordmark on my Olive unit is Olive, quiet and tonal, the difference between shouting a brand and wearing one. This is the kind of detail a designer notices at a store, photographs from four angles, and then carries around like a small warm coal. It's also why I paid full price, and I've made peace with exactly one of those two facts.

Good design is mostly decisions like this: invisible when they're right, and impossible to unsee once you catch them. Now I see tonal logos everywhere. T-shirts, candles, a cereal box at the grocery store. You cannot get it back. I'm telling you so you know what you're in for.

Anyway, moving on, before I start a mood board of tonal wordmarks, which is a real threat I am making to myself.

the soft landing

A tiny waterproof thing that plays the whole house's music and comes with you anyway is a small luxury that has quietly improved more weekends than things costing three times as much, and if your summer was missing a soundtrack, this fills the gap without filling the bag.

I keep meaning to test the full dunk, the meter of water, the thirty minutes, because the spec says it survives and I don't trust spec sheets as far as I can

Bring the speaker. Skip the cables. Watch the sunset in Sunset, or in my case, in sage.

• ava