Play it loud and proud. Or at least slightly louder and prouder.
Once upon a time, transistor radios were all the rage. Without these portable radios with their pitiful little speakers, teenagers wouldn’t have learned about the latest music that was deemed “boss.” Technology has reached levels that those kids with the transistor radios sitting on their beds and front stoops couldn’t even have imagined. Thanks to the Walkman, the Discman, the iPod--and now, the iPhone--music delivery takes more than a few transistors these days.
Like the radios of old, however, the iPhone has a teeny-tiny external speaker. To be fair, the iPhone is really meant to be used with headphones, but what happens when you want to share the “Girl Drink Drunk” skit from The Kids in the Hall with your friends? The omnidirectional speaker just doesn’t cut it. Ten One Design hopes to fix the problem with the SoundClip passive sound enhancer. The little black clip attaches to the bottom of your iPhone and uses a conical chamber to amplify and improve the sound coming from the iPhone’s speaker. It’s the equivalent of the cone megaphone that cheerleaders scream through, but just really, really small. While the sound enhancement isn’t going to turn your iPhone into a boom box, it does make your music and videos sound better at close range.
The biggest advantage to using the SoundClip is its ability to keep our hands from covering the speaker when you’re playing our favorite iPhone games in landscape mode. The tab that sticks out didn’t interrupt our playing and--in fact--gave us an extra bit to hold on to. Our biggest problem with it was how easily it was to lose the little dongle. We spent 30 minutes looking for it once, although the SoundClip can also easily attach to your iPhone’s charging cable. A selection of colors other than black would be nice.
The SoundClip does enhance the sound coming out of your iPhone, if only slightly, and it comes in handy for playing landscape-oriented games.
De-wimpifies the iPhone’s onboard speaker.
Easy to lose. Audio amplification won’t wow anyone.
