Kmart Anko Bluetooth True Wireless Portable Speakers

Great value stereo Bluetooth speakers, instructions are flawed though – To summarise, these are a great entry level set of Bluetooth speakers. Two speakers that can do stereo sound for $40, can't go wrong! If you decide to get something decent later, then you can always keep these as a backup. They're not sexy, but they may save the day. I'm partly just posting this review for people like me that may have impulse purchased these but can't figure out what they just bought since the instructions are a bit poor.

It took a couple of hours of testing and trial & error to work out how to pair the speakers with one another for stereo sound because the instructions are wrong. If you figure it out though, you have a nice pair of cheap portable stereo speakers. Turns out you need to power them on at the same time and then after they play the "power on" noise, hold "play" on both speakers until they make another noise and then the blue LED stops flashing. LED will be blue and not flashing on both speakers if they are paired with one another but not yet paired to a media device. It's hard enough for me to communicate this, I'm not surprised this got lost in translation. After getting them into this state, press "play" again on one of them to enable pairing with your device. Don't simply pair your phone with both speakers individually or you just get two mono speakers.

The sounds it makes to indicate various state changes such as the "powered on", "paired" and "shutdown" sounds are quite in-your-face and unintuitive. Subtle, symbolic sounds would have led to a lot more pleasant user experience and caused less initial confusion while attempting to decipher the incomplete instructions.

The speakers are small, each unit is just 10cm high so don't expect much bass. I tested the bass and could hear nothing below 100hz (as advertised). Other than that, the volume and sound quality was better than expected for the price. They are cheap plastic with a synthetic fabric weave around the barrel. They don't look or feel bad, but they do reek of phthalates as you'd expect from such a product made of plastic in this price range. They weigh about twice that of a can of drink (girth is slightly more than a drink can). Doing the pairing maneuver mentioned above with one speaker in each hand is fairly easy once you know what to do, you don't have to start them up on a flat surface. The colour is listed as "Gray" but I'd call them Black.

They are most suitable for music, testing showed a fairly consistent ~200ms audio lag which is slighting irritating when watching video. Apparently this is not uncommon for Bluetooth speakers though. I observed the audio lag when testing both on Windows 10 and several Android mobile devices with default settings. I should mention that I did manage to reduce the lag in one case by using different Bluetooth codecs at low quality, but the Samsung device reverted my changes shortly after and I couldn't make them stick.

You can plug each individual speaker into a headphone jack (the two supplied cords were less than 50cm long each). If you want to plug them into a PC, as the instructions say "When the AUX cable is connected you can now play music through either Speaker". The keyword being "either", not both and in this case it seems the instructions are correct. I couldn't work out a way to use them with the supplied headphone cable while speakers were paired to produce stereo sound (it was worth a try, but clearly they don't have a fast enough Bluetooth connection with each other to do this effectively). To resolve this you have to supply your own adapter to split each channel and deliver it to each speaker for a wired stereo experience. This eliminates the Bluetooth audio lag making them a suitable set of wired stereo PC speakers.

When I plugged a speaker into a PC or a Android device using the speakers micro USB port, it is not detected as an audio device. It appears that the micro USB port is only for drawing charge. It also has a full size USB port "Type A", when connected to the PC using this port it is detected as a "JieLi BR21" audio device (both output and mic). You will need to supply your own male-male type A USB cord to get this to work. While I assume this USB option provides fast, higher quality audio, I found no easy way to get both working as separate stereo channels over USB. It's certainly not going to be user friendly option if it is at all possible. Over USB, it also gives your PC access to the inbuilt Mic though (I didn't test the quality).

Apparently you can plug in a USB drive or TF Card containing music files to use it as a standalone music player. I've not tested this, there's no mention of what file formats are supported.