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HTC BoomBass is a portable mini speaker for your HTC One (hands-on photos)

The HTC BoomBass is a portable speaker for use with your HTC phone. It pairs over Bluetooth, but only takes the bass notes, letting your phone deal with the rest.

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Andrew is CNET's go-to guy for product coverage and lead photographer for Europe. When not testing the latest phones, he can normally be found with his camera in hand, behind his drums or eating his stash of home-cooked food. Sometimes all at once.
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Andrew Lanxon
2 min read

BERLIN -- With its dual front-facing speakers, the HTC One smartphone already provides some of the best noise you'll get from a phone. If that's not quite enough for you then check out the BoomBass. This rechargeable, portable speaker adds extra low-end to your HTC phone to give a warmer, richer sound -- in theory, at least.

There's no official word on price or availability yet, but HTC reckons it'll be on sale later this year and rumours have suggested a £60 price tag.

Design
At about 3 inches square, the BoomBass is a very small little speaker. It'll sit happily on your hand and you won't struggle at all to pop it into a little bag to carry it with you to the park. It's made from a stiff plastic, with a rubberised textured finish which should help it put up with a few knocks and bumps if you do cart it everywhere with you.

HTC BoomBass mini speaker adds low-end sound to your HTC One (pictures)

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The speaker fires upward, with a bass exhaust on the back, meaning you won't be muffling the sound if you sit it on the grass. The bottom section of the speaker slides forward, acting as a stand for your phone. It doesn't physically connect to your phone, so you won't be able to get any charge from it. The speaker itself does charge over Micro-USB, although HTC wasn't able to give any quotes on battery life.

Features
Rather than act as a standard portable speaker, the BoomBass only plays the low-end sounds sent from your phone. The mids and highs will still be played from your normal phone speakers. On the one hand, this means that the bass is less likely to distort the rest of the sound when you crank the volume up.

The downside is that the BoomBass is only compatible with HTC's phones that have forward-facing speakers, as they require specific software to be able to split the audio over Bluetooth. The One, the One Mini, and the newly announced Desire 601 will all work, but don't expect it to work properly with your Galaxy S4 or iPhone 5.

I wasn't able to put the speaker to the test in my brief hands-on time, so I'll save the verdict on its sound quality for the full review. In the meantime, check out our dedicated IFA zone for all the latest tech launches from Berlin.