iDuck is a waterproof wireless speaker for your MP3 player, mobile phone or CD player with a built in bathroom radio. Find Me A Gift sent me one to try out.
Once you’ve added five AAA batteries (not included) the iDuck is very easy to set up and use, I didn’t need the instructions.
The radio has a simple scan system – no digital pre-sets or analogue gauge, just press the scan button until you’ve reached your desired station. This makes the product very clean of buttons, so it has been easy to waterproof. It does the job fine, I found the signal was good enough, but it’s not exactly advanced tech.
Apart from the radio this is also a wireless speaker. Plug your iPhone or other music player to the egg-shaped transmitter via the 3.5mm jack cable (included) and flick the duck over to speaker. Set your music going and you can listen to your music collection in the bath or shower without having your device anywhere near the water. I tested this at home with the duck in the bathroom and the transmitter in every other room – it just about worked from all the bedrooms upstairs (our bathroom is pretty central) but not from downstairs, it stopped once you were half way down the stairs. There was some interference to start with but pressing the scan/reset button a couple of times sorted that out. Once I’d ‘paired’ the transmitter with the speaker it worked first time each time I used it without any problems. As with all transmitters of this type, you have to be careful of where you put both the transmitter and receiver – a bit of trial and error might be needed, but I was able to get a pretty good signal to be able to listen to my music without difficulty.
As you might expect, the downfall in this product is the speaker. It’s a very small, very cheap speaker surrounded in plastic, which leads to a cheap sound. I love my music and appreciate excellent sound quality but this just isn’t that. But then for under £25 and in a speaker designed for use in your bathroom you don’t expect beautiful music so it’s forgivable.
There are just two volume settings, low and high, so you have very little control. Actually the low setting is still quite loud, and the high setting very loud.
Oh and for the record, it does float in the bath… but I shall always leave mine on the side in the interest of safety!
Let’s face it, this is a novelty item (and is marketed as such), but it does have some use. If you can forgive the lack of quality in the speaker then you’ll be fine with this. Certainly makes a great gift.
The iDuck floating bathroom radio and speaker costs £23.99 from Find Me A Gift.