This powerful new Bluetooth speaker has a great unusual feature: a microSD card slot
Atlantic Technology’s speaker looks good, and won’t actually require you to stream from your phone
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The new Atlantic Technology Nexa 1 is a Bluetooth speaker with a useful difference: it has a microSD card slot to expand your audio options and enable you to listen to music without having to stream it to the speaker. Although, naturally, you can stream to it too.
As you can see above, it’s a good-looking thing, and it’s sitting by a pool because it has the confidence that comes from IPX5 water resistance. We wouldn’t recommend chucking it in for a swim, but it’s more than capable of resisting splashes and the odd bit of rain.
Atlantic Technology Nexa 1 Bluetooth speaker: key features and pricing
The Nexa 1 has twin 2.5-inch aluminum full range drivers and a rear passive oval radiator for bass. The amplifier can put out 60W of power, which is a lot for a mid-size speaker – theJBL Charge 5is 40W, and that’s no slouch. In addition to the microSD port, there’s also a 3.5mm aux connector and the obligatory USB-C charging port. If you have a second Nexa, you can use that USB-C port to charge one speaker from the other.
The Bluetooth version here is 5.3, and battery life is a claimed 15 hours between charging. There’s support for one-touch stereo pairing with a second speaker, and there’s a built-in mic for hands-free calling. Frequency response is 20Hz to 20kHz.
The Nexa 1 has an RRP of $199 but there’s currently an introductory offer that brings the price down to $149on the Atlantic Technology website, although right now there appears to be a glitch that means the product page disappears after a few seconds. Hopefully that’ll get fixed quickly.
The discounted rate is significant because the market for thebest Bluetooth speakersis incredibly crowded and incredibly competitive: when you’re buying in the $150 to $250 price bracket you’re also looking at some of the heaviest hitters including our current favorite, theSonos Roam 2.At the time of writing, that’s currently also on promotion,taking it down from the usual $179 to $143.
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Writer, broadcaster, musician and kitchen gadget obsessive Carrie Marshall has been writing about tech since 1998, contributing sage advice and odd opinions to all kinds of magazines and websites as well as writing more than a dozen books. Her memoir,Carrie Kills A Man, is on sale now and her next book, about pop music, is out in 2025. She is the singer in Glaswegian rock bandUnquiet Mind.
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