Olixar AquaFonik Bluetooth Shower Speaker Review

It has happened to all of us at one point or another – you’re in the shower and your mobile phone rings. It’s one of those important calls you’ve been expecting on the day but hoped would have held off long enough to finish off your bathroom rituals.

You attempt to get yourself out of the shower with shampoo semi-rinsed from your hair whilst you clamour for a towel from the rack. On your way closer to the phone, shuffling over the tiles on top of the bath mat that is becoming increasingly soggy and heavy with soapy water you know your time is running out. After reaching the bathroom door you dance over the outside carpet trying hopelessly not to get it too wet. You grasp the phone from the hallway table ready to answer…

… but you miss the call and it is just your luck that the caller identification is blocked as well.

Great, just great.

Of course, we don’t always want to be able to take phone calls in the shower or bath but those times when we do it’d be great to have a solution that doesn’t involve getting a waterproof or water resistant phone.

Well, one such solution is the Olixar AquaFonik Bluetooth shower speaker. It’s a fairly simply device with buttons to control your music (play/pause, last track and next track) as well as a button to answer and hang up phone calls. It can affix to a surface with its suction cup and has an internal battery to power the device. Recharging is courtesy of the supplied USB cable. Of course, there is a speaker to let you hear your music or phone call in progress as well as a microphone to let you speak.

Pretty much the basics to make this work but how does it fare?

Well, firstly you do need to adjust the volume on your phone (or other Bluetooth device) though as there aren’t any volume adjustments on the Olixar Aquafonik speaker. I found that listening to music in the shower worked well enough – it was loud enough in my shower but I would have appreciated some extra volume. No surround sound, stereo output or special audio signatures and calibration here though, just glorious mono but audio production is sufficient enough to get you into some shower karaoke in no time 🙂

Phone calls on the other hand were a different matter – when I got a phone call from my wife she said it sounded as if I was talking underwater (this may have been something to do with the internal waterproofing and the likelihood of the microphone being much smaller than the speaker). The volume on my end was also softer compared to music even after ensuring that all volume controls were turned all the way up (as Android and Windows Phone smartphones have separate controls for phone calls and media). I had to turn down the shower and put my ear up against the speaker to be able to hear properly. Usable but not entirely ideal but maybe useful enough to answer a phone call and ask the caller to wait a moment or arrange a more convenient time to talk.

In terms of battery life it is rated for around five hours of usage before it goes flat. Initially, I had issues with the speaker seemingly going flat after a single use but I later discovered through some experimentation that I had been incorrectly turning off the unit. All you need to do is hold down the power button until you hear the three descending tones (which will the opposite to what you hear when you power up the unit – makes sense).

Lastly, I should probably cover how much this speaker sucks, specifically its ability to stay stuck to surfaces. I found that in order to stick to tiles the surface would need to be washed and dried. Soap scum seems to easily thwart the suction cup. In terms of affixing the speaker to glass it stayed stuck one the glass had warmed up a bit. Trying to stick the speaker on glass when the glass was stone cold would result in the speaker losing suction. Thankfully, the speaker was able to survive several drops from about 1.5m after some trial and error on my part.

Ultimately, after sorting out my misunderstanding of how to switch off the speaker, it has worked pretty well and for roughly $30 at MobileZap it won’t break the bank either. You can check out MobileZap’s  range of Bluetooth speakers here – thanks to them for sending out this product to review. While you may not need to take phone calls whilst showering all that often at least you can listen to some tunes and have some control over your music.