General Use

In use, the SPK-796 sounded pretty good; although due to the speaker elements being placed so close to each other, the stereo separation was lacking a bit. The sound was quite punchy and very clear, but as you can understand from the size of it, lacking in bass. The sound isn't going to fill up any larger room, but it's good enough to replace a smaller portable boom box without the boom. At least you know it won't get your neighbours banging on your door.

Using it as a handsfree kit works well enough, although some feedback occurs due to the microphone being located in the middle, between the two speakers. Still, if you're not keen on having something in your ear all day or you make a lot of conference calls on your mobile, then this might just be what you've been looking for as the voice output quality is very crisp and clear.

Setting up the SPK-796 is very easy; press and hold the play button until a red light flashes and you're ready to sync it up with your Bluetooth device. Depending on the device you use it with the buttons might work slightly different, but with a Windows Mobile 6 device the play button will automatically start playing whatever music you have lined up in Windows Media player. If you tap it again the music will pause.

The volume controls not only set the volume if you tap them gently, but if you press and hold one or the other for about 2 seconds it'll skip to the next track or go back; although a lot of the time it would only go back to the beginning of the same track instead of to the previous track which can be a minor annoyance for some.

Final Thoughts

At $79 US the SPK-796 might seem expensive at first, but compared to other similar products it's actually quite cheap. It's really a matter of what you want and need more than anything.

It does what it says on the tin and the design is simple and clean, but still very functional. However, it has a few minor issues but we're somewhat willing to overlook those based on the overall package and pricing.