After 3 months of using it as my shower speaker, the JBL Go 5 is now my favorite little Bluetooth speaker — and I’d doubly recommend it now it’s had a price cut

• October 6, 2026

You know a piece of technology is good when it becomes a regular part of your life without you making an effort to include it. If you’re reaching for it automatically, it’s a success. The most recent example in my house is the JBL Go 5, even though it is undeniably the weakest speaker that isn’t built into another device.

The Go 5 is a small, tough, waterproof Bluetooth speaker. In our full JBL Go 5 review, we gave it five stars for simply being as good as Bluetooth speakers get when they’re this small. Happily, it has some great discounts today as part of the early Amazon Prime Day deals, along with other JBL speakers.

Prime Day Deals

After that review, I grabbed one for my house, and I use it mainly as a shower speaker. Because it’s small, it can just sit among the other paraphernalia in my bathroom.

When I turn it on, it links instantly to my phone — I’m sure we’ve all had an experience with cheap Bluetooth speakers or headphones in the past where you activate them, and then they take ages to connect, and maybe they don’t connect the first time at all.

JBL has nailed this side of it, which means I’m happy to turn it on and off only when I need it, which means the battery lasts way more than its eight-hour life would suggest. In practice, it lasts weeks and weeks.

It’s tough enough to survive drops and dunkings in the bathroom (both of which it has endured, including a scenic trip out of the window following a particularly poor choice of temporary placement for me), and it sounds really good for something so small.

Okay, when the shower or electric razor are turned on, audio fidelity is low on the list of needs, but it’s just got an amazing amount of bass drive so you can hear the beat when it’s loud without having to turn it up to ridiculous volumes (and it’s not bad at being tuned up hard as well).

Today’s best JBL deals

But being a good bathroom speaker is really only half of why the Go 5 is now such a staple in my home. It’s also the soundtrack for the rest of my morning, because I grab it from the bathroom and take it back to my room while I get ready, since I’m in the groove.

And I’ll take it downstairs with me to make breakfast, to avoid breaking the flow, which is no issue because it’s pocketable, or I can just hook the loop on my finger to take with me even if I’m carrying a bunch of stuff down with me.

The thing is, I already have a speaker in my bedroom! It’s the Sonos Play, and I think it’s fantastic, and I basically did a similar thing of taking that everywhere with me when I got it. I also have a speaker in my kitchen, an Apple HomePod 2nd Gen. And I have another portable Bluetooth speaker I keep around for heading outdoors: the Bang & Olufsen A1 2nd Gen.

They all sound massively better than the Go 5, naturally, but they lose out on convenience. These big wireless speakers give us the dream of moving music room to room with us at will… but you have to choose to move it. You need to stop what you’re doing, get your phone out, select a new option, and turn off the old one.

Or, I can take the Sonos and B&O with me, but they each take up a whole hand to carry and need a deliberate place to put them, given their larger, heavier footprint — the tiny JBL goes wherever I damn well see fit to shove it.

You know what’s no effort? Just taking the Go 5 with me, when it’s so small and light. The music’s not as good, but it doesn’t have to be if I’m making noise fussing with my morning routine or whatever. It just needs to give me a bit of energy, and it does that with the least amount of brain power, and that’s why I end up making it more a part of my routine than the other speakers — and so it’s had more of a positive impact than other speakers, really.

I think for its current price of under $40, it’s especially a killer gift — yes, it’s pretty early in the year to be thinking about that. Still, lots of people are having to rethink how they budget right now, so if you’re looking for something to buy early, I’d absolutely recommend it. Or simply make it an October gift for yourself and listen to some cozy tunes.

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You know a piece of technology is good when it becomes a regular part of your life without you making an effort to include it. If you’re reaching for it automatically, it’s a success. The most recent example in my house is the JBL Go 5, even though it is…