The Best Portable Speakers, According to the Reviews

Buy the JBL Charge 6, or the Flip 7 if you want to carry it further. They took the same scores from the same three outlets, and the Flip is roughly half the size and price.

The three, at a glance

	Review consensus	Battery	Suits	The catch
JBL Charge 6	9.3 — one outlet cooler	Up to 24h	Most people, most of the time	The biggest of the three
JBL Flip 7	9.3 — same split	Up to 14h	Carrying it about	Smaller sound, shorter battery
Sonos Roam 2	7.3 — genuinely contested	Up to 10h	Existing Sonos owners	Weakest battery; reviewers split

Consensus averages three published star ratings converted to a ten-point scale. The “suits” column is ours, read off what those reviewers found — none of them ranked these against each other.

The disagreement is the useful part

Two of these speakers were scored identically by all three outlets. One was not.

What Hi-Fi gave the Sonos Roam 2 three out of five, describing the sound as unexceptional and the price as a hike. TechRadar and Tom’s Guide both gave it four. That is a wider split than anything in this category usually produces, and it is worth more than the average it drags down.

Read the three reviews together and the split resolves into something coherent rather than contradictory: they are scoring different products. The outlets that liked it were weighing the Wi-Fi system integration — a Sonos speaker that joins your existing setup at home and travels. The one that did not was weighing the sound per pound against speakers that cost less.

Both are right. Which is right for you depends entirely on whether you already own Sonos, which is why it is on this list with that condition attached rather than ranked third.

Why Bose is not here

The obvious rival to the Charge 6 is Bose’s SoundLink Flex, and it is missing on purpose.

Only two of these three outlets have reviewed the current second-generation model — TechRadar and Tom’s Guide both gave it four out of five, and What Hi-Fi has not published one. Two reviews is a citation, not a consensus, and this format needs three. It may well be a good speaker; we simply cannot say so on the same evidential footing as the rest of the page.

What to actually do

• Start with the Flip 7 unless you need the battery. Same scores, less money, and most people overbuy in this category.
• Take the Charge 6 if it lives outdoors — twenty-four hours and a power-bank output is a materially different thing on a long day.
• Only consider the Roam 2 if you already run Sonos. Bought purely as a Bluetooth speaker, the outlet that judged it that way gave it three stars.
• Check what it cost last month, not the percentage off. Portable speakers are discounted hard and often, so a big number against list price tells you very little. A price-tracking extension takes ten seconds and gives you the only baseline that means anything.