Sonos Play review: the portable Sonos with a battery you can actually swap

What Sonos is offering here

Most portable speakers are mono. Play is stereo in a single box, and you can hear it if you sit in front of it. Sonos claims 24 hours of playback. I have not run it flat in a single sitting, but a full day in the garden and it still had plenty left. It streams over WiFi as part of my Sonos system at home and switches to Bluetooth when I leave the house, so the same speaker does kitchen duty and garden duty.

The bit I care about most is the replaceable battery. Every portable speaker I have owned died the same way: the battery faded after a few years and the whole thing went in a drawer. Sonos says you can swap this one yourself. I have not needed to yet, but I have taken it out to look and it is a simple job. That turns a three-year gadget into a much longer one, and I wish every manufacturer did it.

Toughness and charging

IP67 means it will survive a dunk and a dusty shed. Mine has been rained on and knocked off a picnic table with no ill effects. The attachable loop lives on my rucksack. The charging base is in the box, but read the small print: the power adapter is not. I use a spare phone brick.

Who it is really for

If you have a Sonos system, this is the obvious buy. It joins your rooms, groups with your other speakers, and comes along to the barbecue. If you do not own any Sonos kit, you are paying a premium for an app and a WiFi feature you may never use, and there are cheaper Bluetooth-only speakers that sound good. Still, the battery swap alone is a decent argument, and it is why I picked this over the cheaper ones.