The Wonderboom 3 Beat Out 300 Competitors to Become Our Favorite Portable Speaker

The UE Wonderboom 3 Bluetooth speaker has a welcoming curved design, and it’s impossibly small and light—barely bigger than a baseball.

It has a small elastic loop that lets you hang the speaker on any number of objects. The giant + and - buttons make volume control obvious. Initial pairing of your phone and speaker is a breeze via Bluetooth.

And, boy, can it boom great sound. (“As euphonious as Ariana Grande,” according to senior staff writer Brent Butterworth’s memorable description in our guide to portable Bluetooth speakers.)

When I stream music from my phone to the Wonderboom speaker, the result is crisp, clear, and loud. It’s not as robust or perfect as what I could get from a high-quality surround system, but it’s surprisingly clean and powerful. During one of my son’s pandemic-era backyard birthday parties, I could hear Elsa belting “Let It Go” from 75 feet away.

Before the Wonderboom came into our lives, we were mostly using Amazon Echo devices to stream music throughout our house.

Sometimes (cringe) I’d just listen directly through my iPhone’s lousy speaker. I’m not proud to admit this, but there was a time, several years ago, when we regularly tried to amplify sound outside by slotting an iPhone into a janky silicone sound amplifier like this one.

How lost we were.

This nifty little speaker is waterproof: It can tolerate being dunked fully underwater for 30 minutes (though since it floats, that would likely never happen).

The Wonderboom can also survive a 5-foot fall. (Here’s video evidence of us validating this claim.)

That’s particularly critical for my son—a Fernando Tatis Jr. devotee intent on becoming a professional baseball player—who takes every opportunity to throw anything even marginally resembling a ball as far and hard as possible.

If our Wonderboom can survive his constant heaving, it should hold up well for you.

We’ve tested roughly 300 (yes, 300) portable Bluetooth speakers for our guide. And even though many of them provide good value and performance, we’ve concluded that the Wonderboom will please most people who are looking for a portable Bluetooth speaker.

• Versions of it have been our pick since 2019.
• In our brand-concealed listening tests, our panel of audio experts ranked the Wonderboom as the all-around most versatile choice.
• Its Micro-USB charger is a bit behind the times, as most speakers use USB-C.

Read more in our review of the best portable Bluetooth speakers.

Having used this speaker every day for years, I have some advice for you:

• Make sure your speaker is charged. It’s a total bummer to grab your Wonderboom for a rollicking backyard shindig only to discover that it’s out of juice. Checking the battery life is easy: Just hold down the + and - buttons simultaneously for a few seconds, and the speaker plays noises that intuitively correspond to battery levels. Anytime my speaker is at half battery or less, I recharge it for next time, so it’s always ready to go.
• Keep your phone (or other streaming device) relatively close to the speaker. Our journalists have measured the Bluetooth range at nearly 100 feet, but I’ve definitely made the mistake of wandering, phone in pocket, too far from the speaker and unintentionally killing a backyard get-together’s vibe when the music cuts out.

This post was originally part of our 2021 “52 Things We Love” series, an ode to Wirecutter picks that have withstood the test of time. Read the entire series. The current version was edited by Annemarie Conte and Grant Clauser.