JBL Charge 5 Review

Welcome to another video. I just completed the review of the JBL Xtreme 3, so go check that out if you want to. I'm just going to be moving swiftly on to the JBL Charge 5. I've never had one of the JBL speakers in the Charge range before, so mainly, I was excited to see the charging, about how it charges your phone. You'd think from the name ,it's the main point of these speakers, I suppose.

As I said in the review for the Xtreme 3, I plugged my phone into it on a 50% charge. It said it would take 3 hours and 10 minutes to charge to full, which to be honest in this day and age is quite shocking, especially if you had Google Maps or anything like that, you could be actually about 3 UNCLEAR. To take 3 hours to do 40%, I'm not impressed at all, to be honest. With the Xtreme 3, I plugged that in and after about an hour and a bit, so that's a lot better, and that's not even supposedly in the Charge range. If you're getting the JBL Charge 5 and you think it's going to be a great phone charger, stay well clear, because it's not. Honestly, that's the reason I was interested to pick it up, and I'm very disappointed on that side.

On the general speaker terms, the JBL Charge 5 is quite small. It's quite light as well, relatively, but not light enough to make it feel bad quality, but not too heavy to make it feel like it's a bit unnecessary. It's got a very similar look to the Xtreme 3. It just has some bits here to stop it touching the ground. It has the same metal black subs. They look very nice. It also has the same new design of grip on the bottom and the line charger, the line for the indicator of the charge, which as I said, I don't prefer over the dots, but it does look a bit snazzier.

We also got the orange under the logo, stuff like that. The pairing feature obviously worked very well. JBL has done very well this year on that one, but yeah, to be honest, I just think the JBL Flip 5 might be a better go-to seeing as it's about £80 cheaper than this (prices may change). It has pretty similar sound, but you just can't charge on the Flip 5. To be honest, you're never going to use the JBL Charge 5 as a charger because it's so slow. The only difference between this and the Flip 5 is the charging feature, which is so useless. To be honest, I would say go to the Flip 5 over this.

Personally, I wouldn't go with the JBL Charge 5. While I do like the look, and I like the look of all the new speakers this year, I can't recommend anything in the Charge range, to be honest. It definitely doesn't have much better sound than the Flip 5 to warrant that £80 price tag with the charging feature being quite useless. There's also no way to carry it or anything. I know it's small enough to just pick up, but still, you got to count your wins and losses, I suppose. Yeah, I can't recommend this one really. If you want to see an audio test of it, you can see it versus the Xtreme 3. If you have any other questions, pop them down the comments here, and I'll see you later.