I found the ultimate shower speaker

The sticking point for a lot of affordable speakers is how they sound and how long they can last on a single charge. It’s one thing to make a speaker small, and it’s a whole other challenge to make one that makes your favorite tracks pop — especially with a battery life that will last you for days away from a charger. For many sub-$100 Bluetooth speakers you can find digging around online, those boxes can be surprisingly hard to check.

Luckily, that isn’t a problem for the JBL Clip 5. It’s able to dodge those pitfalls and serve as a more than adequate successor to the JBL Clip 4 by keeping the best of JBL’s early portable speaker and improving many of the features it was lacking. The Clip 5 sounds better than JBL’s previous speaker, has a longer battery life that can be extended even further with some software trickery, and it doesn’t cost any more than $80, the JBL Clip 4’s original price. The JBL Clip 5 is, in many ways, the ideal sequel, with the only drawbacks being nitpicks that you can read more about below.

Recommended

JBL Clip 5

The JBL Clip 5 is better than the Clip 4 in all the ways you’d want: better sound, bigger battery, and the same great clip.

Pros

• IP67 rating
• Up to 15 hours of battery life
• Louder and richer sound

Cons

• Need to use companion app for some features

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Price, availability, and specs

The JBL Clip 5 was announced at the Consumer Electronics Show in January 2024, and released in June alongside several of JBL’s other “ultra-portable” Bluetooth speakers. Having just reviewed the JBL Clip 4, I’ve found it naturally shares many similarities with JBL’s previous clip-on speaker, including the presence of a built-in carabiner, IP67 waterproof and dustproof rating, USB-C port for charging, simple Bluetooth pairing, and that affordable $80 price.

Where it differs is in the details, like a longer battery life, improved audio driver, and redesigned body. They add up to make it an overall better option if you’re looking for a new speaker, whether you’re getting it in black, blue, pink, purple, red, or white. Even though they were released only a few years apart (the Clip 4 arrived in 2020), the Clip 5 is effectively the modernized version of the Clip 4, in all the good and bad ways that entails.

What I liked about the JBL Clip 5

I had some quibbles with the Clip 4’s audio performance, mainly because its sound reproduction never quite matched its loudness in terms of quality. Essentially, it was easy to make it out above a loud shower or hood fan, harder to pick up all the details that I just knew were hiding in my songs. The JBL Clip 5 has solved all of those problems, within reason. Its larger 1.75-inch driver means the speaker is not only loud, but it also feels noticeably more detailed than the Clip 4.

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Everything I listened to felt more layered. I could pull out individual instruments in more complex songs, and the bass was ever so slightly bassier in comparison to what I heard on the Clip 4. These improvements extended to my non-music listening, too. Like the Clip 4, I found the Clip 5 to be a helpful companion for my shower podcast listening. I’m no expert, but if I can hear a host’s voice over the water without having to fuss with volume or EQ, that’s a good sign. If you do need to change EQ, JBL offers custom controls in its companion app and includes multiple default profiles to pick from, including one focused on vocals, which makes chat-heavy podcasts even easier to make out.

In exchange for these audio improvements (and changes to the clip part of the Clip itself), the JBL Clip 5 is ever so slightly thicker and longer than its predecessor. At no point in my testing process did I find this change to be a real problem. The Clip 5 still feels portable and isn’t any heavier than my iPad, making it easy to toss in my bag when I go to the park. If anything, I’d argue the change in size is more visual than anything else. You’ll notice it, but I don’t think it makes much of a difference.

Having a built-in clip is still an awesome feature

Call me simple, but I haven’t gotten over how versatile JBL’s Clip line is. I extolled the virtues of the built-in carabiner in my Clip 4 review, but I’ll do it again here because I still love clipping the speaker on things, and JBL has made some tweaks since the Clip 4’s 2020 release until now.

The Clip 5’s clip is wider than before, which means when it’s pushed open, you can fit it around more things without having to worry about it breaking — a versatility that can’t be understated. The Clip 5 can follow me from the shower, to the kitchen, to the park, purely because it’s so easy to attach to things. I sound like a broken record, but I’ll stand by the claim that all portable speakers would be better with a built-in clip.

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Good battery life gets even longer

The Clip 4 was good for 10 hours of battery life, a respectable amount of time for a speaker that small and one that could be easily stretched to many more days of actual use. The Clip 5 takes things even further with 12 hours of battery life and a feature JB calls Playtime Boost that can extend listening even further by an additional 3 hours.

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That gives you 15 hours of battery life on the Clip 5, not necessarily an amount I think you need on a Bluetooth speaker, but still great if you’re trying to push things to the limit. Playtime Boost comes with some limitations in the sense that it flattens and degrades the quality of the audio in exchange for that longer battery life, but it’s still handy to have in a pinch if you know you’re going to need your speaker later.

What I didn’t like about the JBL Clip 5

You have to use a companion app to access all the features

The real disadvantage of the JBL Clip 5 is that, in order to use features like Playtime Boost or Stereo Pairing, you need to have access to the “JBL Portable” companion app. The app is free and easy to set up, but it’s annoying that to take advantage of all the benefits of the Clip 5, you need to clutter your phone with yet another app. The only thing that escapes the inconvenience is Auracast, a method for sharing audio between compatible Auracast speakers, which, for whatever reason, can be enabled with just a button push on the Clip 5 itself. A feature like EQ adjustment I wouldn’t necessarily expect to be possible on a speaker with so few buttons, but for everything else? That’s the kind of challenge that should be met, in my opinion, not shuffled off to an app.

Not everything needs a giant logo

This is extremely nitpicky, but one of the things that regularly makes me less excited about JBL’s audio products is the fact that, whether it’s a speaker or a sound bar, there’s always a giant “JBL” printed somewhere on the side. It’s not ugly — by and large, I think JBL is good at making elegant and playful products — but it does feel kind of tacky. I don’t think any audio brand is going to be the next Gucci or Coach. I understand the impulse, but other than Beats, which arguably got pretty close thanks to some choice marketing with some help from professional athletes, you really end up hurting yourself more than helping.

Should you buy the JBL Clip 5?

If the JBL Clip 5 somehow cost more for all the extra features it has over the Clip 4, I could see an argument for considering other options, but all of that for the exact same price? How could I not recommend it? The JBL Clip 5’s mixture of convenience, thanks to the clip, long battery life, and sound performance make it an easy gift for yourself or anyone else.

Recommended

JBL Clip 5

It’s also a great replacement for the JBL Clip 4, which I already thought was an excellent speaker. If you’ve been looking for a shower speaker, look no further. This is the one to get.