Anker is no stranger to theportable Bluetooth speakermarket, and the Soundcore Motion 100 is just one of a slew of recent additions to the brand. However, this compact speaker manages to squeeze in the value, providing a lot for its $60 price tag.
With robust sound and excellent clarity alongside a 12-hour battery life, you can’t ask for much more from such an affordable speaker. It’s not the smallest, lightest, loudest, or longest-running, but the Soundcore Motion 100 is ready to give its rivals a run for their money.
Anker Soundcore Motion 100
The Anker Soundcore Motion 100 puts its effort into what counts. Its two speaker drivers let it put out plenty of volume while maintaining clarity, and it can even get a little lively with the bass boosted. Pair that with a decent battery life and a low price tag, and you’ve got the recipe for a winner.
Price and availability
The Anker Soundcore Motion 100 is available now for $60 from Anker’s Soundcore website and Amazon. It’s currently only available in its black color, but two more colors are coming in 2024.
Design, hardware, and what’s in the box
A compact speaker with a lot of sound
The Anker Soundcore Motion 100 is a simple package; you get the speaker, a charging cable, and some documentation. It would have been nice for Anker to have included a little clip for attaching the speaker to items. As it stands, the small strap coming out of one end of the speaker is still handy as an anchor point — you just have to supply your own means of connecting it to other gear.
The speaker is fairly compact, not much bigger than your typical hotdog, bun and all. This makes it a great portable option. It’s not quite as tiny as theSony SRS-XB100, but it’s still in the ballpark to serve as a goodportable Bluetooth speakerand quite a bit more portable than something like the Tribit StormBox Flow.
The design of the Anker Soundcore Motion 100 is fairly simple, but has touches of elegance. Most of the frame is a soft-touch, rubberized material that’s easy to grip and has a black color speckled over with little splotches of blue. The speakers are covered in a hard, plastic grille with a silver finish that hides the two drivers. There’s also a simpler grille on the back that appears to be handling passive radiation to help extend the bass depth of the speakers. The Anker Soundcore Motion 100 sits on four little rubber feet that keep it from sliding and bouncing around when the music is bumping.
Anker positioned the controls on top of the speaker. The power button and Bluetooth pairing button sit off to one side. On the other, there are controls for volume, play-pause, and a bass boost. It lacks a dedicated control for track skipping, but multiple taps of the play button can skip forward or back. You won’t find a mic or button for tapping into your phone’s voice assistant on the speaker.
At the opposite end of the tether, the speaker has a little rubber plug that covers up the USB-C charging cable to help keep the device’s IPX7 water resistance intact. While a little dunk in the water might not destroy the speaker, there’s plenty of space for water to enter it, impacting the sound and taking some draining and time to dry.
Sound and battery life
Crisp, clear sound
The Anker Soundcore Motion 100 runs a pair of 10-watt speakers situated at opposite ends of the device. While this doesn’t create incredible stereo separation, it offers a little bit more flavor to the sound than single-driver systems.
What’s especially nice about the speakers in the Anker Soundcore Motion 100 is how crisp they are. They offer a great deal of clarity that’s perfect for listening to podcasts, where your ability to make out what people are saying is crucial. This translates into good performance in the mids while listening to music as well, and it can help while watching TV or movies, as dialogue will also fall in this range.
That clarity holds up in the treble range, where cymbals and higher-register instruments have a pleasant crispness, though I wouldn’t call them particularly poignant. This is definitely a mids-forward system.
The bass is modest but decent for such a compact speaker. You won’t get a thumping, heart-pounding experience from the Anker Soundcore Motion 100, even with the bass booster engaged, but it’s a good deal better than even the best laptop or phone speakers. Listening to one of my benchmark tracks, Of Montreal’s “I Feel Ya Strutter,” the bass line that rides through the entire song is clear and slinky, but not as powerful as it could be. Still, it proves an overall pleasant listening experience, and the speaker does a good job holding up to the complex mix of instruments on that album.
The Anker Soundcore Motion 100 supports the AAC codec for generally improved audio quality compared to SBC but can also support LDAC. By default, this is turned off, as not all phones (and no iPhones) support it, and can have connection stability issues. With it enabled, it can improve audio quality. Notably, listening to Of Montreal’s “Nonpareil Of Favor,” I caught more of the cymbals as they gradually faded into the background, where a more compressed signal would likely have seen them dissolve rather quickly. In general, it seems to just add a little extra crispness to the treble.
Multipoint audio is available on the speaker as well, and it readily connected to both my phone and computer. That said, the hand-off between devices can be a little slow. My phone making any noise would interrupt whatever was coming from the computer, and it would take 5-10 seconds for the laptop audio to resume. It’s still quicker than disconnecting one device and then connecting another or having to pair anew every time you want to switch devices.
you may expect 12 hours of battery life from the Soundcore Motion 100, which isn’t record-breaking but is plenty from such a compact and loud speaker. That battery life is with the speaker at 50% volume, and it’s more than loud enough to fill a 100-square-foot room at that level or to provide some pleasant ambiance in a larger space. After several hours of using the speaker to listen to music, podcasts, YouTube videos, and an hour-long TV show, it was only down to about 50% charge, holding up to Anker’s 12-hour claim.
Competition
Is it worth the price?
The Anker Soundcore Motion 100 enters a competitive field. I recently tested theTribit StormBox Flow, and for $80, that speaker was an impressive option with plenty of volume and extreme battery life. That said, the Anker Soundcore Motion 100 is cheaper, more portable, and has the edge when it comes to clarity. If you’re just after a pump-up track, Tribit has the edge, but when every detail counts, Anker pulls it back. Tribit’s bigger advantage is that you can easily combine a pair of StormBox Flow speakers into a stereo setup.
The Sony SRS XB100 is the same price at $60. Those who prize portability will find its compact size and integrated strapping mechanism especially handy. But, if you’ve got even a little extra room to play with, the Anker Soundcore Motion 100 has more battery life and a more enjoyable sound, especially thanks to its two speakers, than the Sony’s SRS XB100’s.
Should you buy it?
At an affordable $60 price point, the Anker Soundcore Motion 100 is an impressive package. It doesn’t have some of the more advanced features some Bluetooth speakers have been offering recently, like the ability to pair multiple units or access smart assistants, but it has its priorities straight. It delivers on sound, battery life, and portability, making it a speaker that’s easy to bring and worth doing.
With a pair of speaker drivers and a nice little bass-boost option, the Anker Soundcore Motion 100 can pump out respectable volume. Its edge is in how clear its sound is, not distorting or muddying the vocal range with too much bass. Getting that kind of audio experience at $60 is a solid deal when so many other Bluetooth speakers are coming in at well over $100.
The Soundcore Motion 100 is a great little speaker from Anker, providing clear sound and volume at a great price that’ll make it hard to beat for value hunters.
