I was so pleased in fact that I was disappointed in my purchase of the muted black color they had at the store when a fellow T-Mobile store had bright eye catching colors to choose from. I immediately exchanged the black one for a Blue and Red color akin to Superman. While I was there, I impulsively purchased a black (only color they had, sad) UE Megaboom, the bigger brother to the Boom. To this day, I don't know what possessed me to spend so much more on a second speaker that I didn't need, but I did it, and I honestly don't regret it.
The full, and beautiful sound of the UE Boom was massively enhanced with the Megaboom. The low range notes in the music were so much more full and immersive, that I am still shocked it was able to pull that off. The Megaboom is double the size of the Boom, which makes it much less portable, as it doesn't fit in a pocket at all, but the Boom isn't quite the picnic with pocket ability either. Both come equipped with a metal D-Ring screwed into the base of the speaker, and I have found that a quick carabiner makes the speaker easily belt mounted with minimum discomfort. Obviously, it's a little more reasonable to hang the Boom on the belt, rather than the Megaboom, but both are possible, and for those that carry backpacks, messenger bags, or purses, they can hang from there as well.
Smaller things of note, before we dig into longevity, is that the charging cable and blocks are some of the nicest I have ever had. So nice in fact, that I attempted to find them being sold on their own to replace all of my current MicroUSB cables. They are long, flat, sturdy cables, and I learned the glory of flat cables with these speakers.
Now let's talk longevity. Speakers are fragile pieces of technology, they wear out pretty fast with continued use, especially if left at high volumes for most of their usage. I usually keep them pretty high, due to the situations in which I need them. I use them when I am doing yard work, when I am taking care of the house, and at social gatherings where music isn't readily available. Over the course of the nearly year of use (will be a year in late August of 2016), the UE Boom has had some noticeable changes. The sound isn't as clear as it once was, when listening at the highest volume level, but not enough to be all that detrimental. The Megaboom however, it exhibited the biggest change; one of the speakers inside the unit had blown, making the entire speaker unbearably hard to use. I am pretty strict about sound quality, as you may notice from our podcasting, so I can't stand listening to music through a broken audio system.
This discovery was disappointing, and I feared I was out of luck with it. I couldn't dream of buying a replacement, and I couldn't justify trying either. I tried the only thing I could think to do, and reached out to Ultimate Ears on Twitter. They lead me to the right place to call, and I phoned in to find out what they could potentially do the help.
I went into this conversation expecting to be told that the limited parts warranty covered the speaker, but they needed to take it, replace the part, and send it back. Despite having an extremely hard time understanding the customer service agent, the conversation went swimmingly. She lead me through the required troubleshooting steps, and eventually the obvious was determined, and she started the warranty process. What I expected was to be told that I had to pay a lot of money to get it shipped and replaced. I thought this because this was my experience with Motorola when my Moto 360 broke within it's warranty period. (Which is why I will no longer purchase a Motorola product again, support is everything folks). What ended up happening was a simple mailing of a shipping label to me. I then package up the speaker and send it to them. Once the receive the broken speaker, they send off the replacement. Sure, that leaves me an unknown amount of time without the speaker, but it's useless to me right now anyway.
So, I will say I was not disappointed with Logitech's customer service on this, but because it's Logitech, I wasn't surprised by it either. They have been a long standing favorite of mine, and as you can see with my reaction to Motorola, I might be a pretty harsh critic of customer service practices.
