Kinivo Personal Mini Speaker & Bluetooth Adapter

Guys, you may not believe what I got in courier recently from Amazon – Kinivo personal (mini) speaker and bluetooth adapter, for review purpose. The best part is: I don’t have to send it back!! Ah, the joys of being a blogger 🙂

You may think that since I got these products for free, I will be more inclined to give a positive review. Well, maybe 😛

Now that you have been warned, I hereby introduce you to my close companion for the last one-and-a-half days: Kinivo Personal (Mini) speaker:

I don’t like the speaker of my cell phone. Proof: I rarely listen to songs on the phone speaker. I hate earphones too – I find them annoying. When I want to listen to songs, I connect my Altec Lansing speakers (with amplifier) to my laptop and play the songs. But I connect the external speakers only once in a week (on Sundays).

Once I got this mini speaker from Kinivo (that connects to cell phone/tablet using the standard 3.5mm jack), I placed my phone and speaker duo right next to me on the bed and started listening to songs. The output quality is better than my cell phone speaker. Proof: I’ve been using it a lot over the last two days! As you can see in the photos, it’s a very small speaker and you can easily carry it around.

One disadvantage is: the volume is lower (than even my cell phone speaker). So, you can use it as a personal speaker for cellphone/tablet, for one person. Even though the quality of sound output is good, this is not a replacement to living room stereo/5.1 speakers.

This speaker can be charged over the USB port or USB power adapter. Yes, there is a battery that needs to be charged. I charged it once and have been using it for the last two days. It’s good that I am now listening to songs whenever I go and lie down on the bed.

Amazon (India) product link: Kinivo ZX 100 Mini Portable Speaker with rechargeable battery.

The tiny thing with blue light you see plugged to the USB port of my laptop in the above photo is a Kinivo Bluetooth adapter. This adapter is used to bluetooth-enable a laptop that doesn’t have a built-in bluetooth adapter – mine doesn’t. Bluetooth is a wireless technology.

Even though the installation manual says that the adapter is only for Windows and Mac OS (based) computers/laptops, I had no problem connecting and working with this adapter on my Linux Mint 9 OS. Once I connected it, the bluetooth icon appeared on the taskbar. After a couple of attempts I paired my cell phone and laptop quite easily.

I was able to transfer one 10.6 MB song from my laptop to the phone (via wireless bluetooth) successfully on my first attempt. Bluetooth technology is slow (the bandwidth clocked around 100 Kbps) and hence it took one minute for me to complete the transfer. But USB cable is faster and that’s what I’ll most probably use to transfer large data/files between my computer and mobile.

However, I can use this external bluetooth adapter as a backup to my USB cable. Also, others may find it useful to connect bluetooth-enabled devices like wireless headphones/speakers (apart from cellphones) with their laptop/computer.

Amazon (India) product link: Kinivo BTD-300 Bluetooth 3.0 USB Adapter.

Destination Infinity