Nokia Play 360 Bluetooth NFC Speaker Review

 We got sent in a Nokia Play 360 Bluetooth speaker to check out last month, and after a long and vicious trial here’s what we thought of it!

The Design:

Available in Black, White, and Blue, the Nokia Play 360 (MD-50W) was initially launched to compliment the NFC capabilities of Nokia’s latest Symbian Belle devices and the MeeGo N9. It’s meant to be a simple, no-fuss portable speaker that you can just dump into a backpack and carry around.

At just 514 grams of weight, and measuring 110 x 110 x 124mm, it’s not too heavy at all and can fit into a handbag quite easily. There’s an aluminum design casing all around the speaker, which might fool you into thinking that it’s the source of the 360 degree sound resonating from the Play 360.
In actuality though, the speaker is at the top, covered with a light mesh membrane with ‘NFC’ embossed on it.

At the front, you have the matt-silver volume buttons, and a Bluetooth key at the bottom, which also acts as a battery indicator and pairing indicator.

At the back, you have a 3.5mm audio jack, a microUSB port for charging, and a power button to switch it on or off. The indicator glows blue when paired, and white when not.

The Sound Quality:

The Play 360 features a 2.5 inch peerless full range driver, with a max output of 75 dB. That’s not too bad at all, all things considering.

If you’re using a single speaker, you will ofcourse, have mono sound though (or as Nokia calls it ‘360 degrees omni-directional sound’), but if that’s important to you, you can always just get another Play 360 and pair them together using the built-in NFC for stereo sound.

In terms of Volume Output, the Play 360 can very easily fill a room. This is mostly due to the fact that the sound driver is omnidirectional instead of straight. For those of you that like technical specs, there’s a frequency response of 86 – 21,000 Hz and total harmonic distortion (THD) at nominal power of < 2% at 200 mV input signal. And about 2.1Watts of power.
It’s not something you’d want for a rave or house party, but for a couple friends over, or a picnic or dinner party, it’s just perfect. We only had one unit so we couldnt get the stereo effect unfortch.

Judging from the single speaker, bass levels are a little low, but come on, what were you expecting from a speaker this size? There’s a bass reflex chamber that helps make sure the deep tones are richer than on most other external speaker we’ve listened to. All that being said, Voices came in clear and loud, with no distortions in music even at the loudest setting. Impressive. We tested the Play 360 with a variety of different music genres, and considering the size, it really was quite amazing.

The NFC:

We had a Nokia 701 on hand to check out how easy it was to pair with the speaker using NFC. You dont need to even think about going into the phone’s settings menu, just tap the 701 (or basically any phone/tablet with NFC) to the top of the Play 360 speakers where “NFC” is written, and both the speakers and the device will indicate that they’ve been paired with each other.

You can pair via Bluetooth as well, which isnt hard but is the same basic procedure where you set the Play 360 to pairing mode, then go into your phone’s bluetooth settings, find the Play 360 and pair with it, yada yada. Not as convenient and quick as “Just Tap” pairing using NFC, but it gets the job done. We noticed the Play 360 paired just fine over Bluetooth with almost anything, iPad, Android or Windows Phone, but was a bit picky with the iPhone 4S.

The Battery Life:

The Play 360 offers an impressive ‘up to’ 21 hours of playback time powered by a Nokia BL-5C Battery. In our tests, the speaker kept going and going for just about the same period. The speakers also have a power saving mode when it’s inactive for over an hour.

The Extra thoughts:

It’s also worth mentioning, that if you get a second Play 360 speaker, you can basically use them both simultaneously as a stereo ‘surround’ sound setup. I asked the product manager at Nokia World 2011, if you could hook four of them up for surround sound, but that wasnt possible it seems.

Another thing that’s worth pointing out, is that if you have a device that does not have Bluetooth or NFC, for example the classic iPod, you can still use the Play 360 with the line-in wire.

Also, it was a bit of a bummer that the Play 360 doesnt have a microphone built-in. If you receive an incoming call while you’re playing music, the speaker will automatically mute the music while you answer you call on your phone. Once you finish, the music fades in. It would have been nice to use it as an external speakerphone of sorts, but it’s not that big a deal to me.

The Conclusion:

There’s not much to dislike about the Nokia Play 360. It does what it’s supposed to do, and it does it well. The pairing procedure is easy and everything just works. What’s not to like?

I’d say it’s definitely recommendable if you’re looking for a wireless speaker for your mobile devices. Currently costs about $130-$150 on various online/offline retailers. If you’re looking for a cheaper, wired alternative, there’s the Nokia MD-11, but ofcourse the sound quality isnt anywhere as good as the 360. Or if you have extra dough, you could go for the Bose Soundlink speakers, which cost a lot more but have better sound quality to boot.

At the end of the day though, the Nokia Play 360 turned out to be one of my favorite pieces of tech so far this year. There’s no messy wires, it can be paired with practically anything, the sound quality is pretty great for it’s size, and the battery life is really impressive. What’s not to like?