Soundcore Select 4 Go Review: IP67 Shower Speaker

Most sub-$30 shower speakers ask you to lower your expectations the moment you unbox them. The Soundcore Select 4 Go is the rare budget exception. Anker's pocket-sized IP67 unit mostly earns its keep. It survives real submersion. It runs all day on a charge. And it pushes more usable volume out of a single 5W driver than its size suggests. The catch isn't the sound or the waterproofing. Instead, it's the controls and the way the speaker juggles Bluetooth connections. Those are two areas where Anker traded polish for a lower price. Here is where the trade-offs land, and who should still buy one.

Sound quality of the Soundcore Select 4 Go

A single 5W full-range driver does the heavy lifting here. Within the limits of physics, it's tuned smartly. At the moderate volumes most people use in a bathroom or on a desk, the Select 4 Go sounds clean. There's a surprising amount of low-end thump for something this small. The highs stay crisp and never turn brittle. Kick drums land with real weight. Its midrange stays smooth, so vocals sit forward instead of getting buried. In practice, that tuning flatters vocals and acoustic tracks.

Push it harder, though, and the ceiling shows. Past roughly 80% volume, the sound tightens up. Bass-heavy tracks start crowding the mids. Even so, it never collapses into the distorted mush that plagues cheaper rivals. Then again, casual listeners rarely push a shower speaker that hard. For podcasts and audiobooks, the tuning is less convincing. Speech can come across slightly soft, and no output preset fully sharpens it.

Two honest caveats matter. First, this is a mono speaker. It plays a single channel, with no stereo image on its own. Pair two units over TWS, though, and you get genuine left-right separation. That's the real way to get stereo out of it. Second, the bass is good for the size, not good in absolute terms. If you want chest-thump, a larger speaker is the only fix. The Soundcore app's custom EQ helps you dial in more treble or bass to taste. That level of control is uncommon in this bracket.

Design, build, and the button problem

Physically, the Select 4 Go gets the fundamentals right. It's light, at under 10 ounces. The woven fabric grille and rubberized shell feel sturdy. A built-in silicone loop clips to a shower caddy, a backpack, or a bike. As a result, it travels easily and survives a gym bag. It's a touch chunkier than people expect. Think closer to a 12-ounce can than a bar of soap. That's still genuinely pocketable. Six colorways give it gift appeal.

Then there are the buttons. This is the speaker's most consistent frustration. The controls are flat and completely untextured. They sit in one smooth rubberized surface, with no raised edges or tactile separation. In practice, you can't pause, skip, or adjust volume by feel. You have to look. In the shower, in bed, or mid-workout, that's a real annoyance. For anyone with low vision, it becomes a genuine accessibility barrier. Those buttons also take a firm, deliberate press. Powering the unit off means holding the key for a few seconds.

Build durability is mostly a strong point. The shell shrugs off the drops a portable speaker actually takes. Often there's nothing worse than a scuff afterward. That said, a small cluster of buyers have hit a harder failure. After a bigger fall, the internal board can shift off its mounting post. That leaves the power button unresponsive. It's a sign the internals aren't braced as well as the exterior. Still, most owners never see this issue at all. The problem isn't common, but it's worth knowing.

Waterproofing and the floating claim

This is where the Soundcore Select 4 Go most clearly justifies itself. The IP67 rating, defined under IEC 60529, means full dust resistance. It also means survival in up to a meter of water for half an hour. In daily use, it holds up exactly as promised. Steamy hour-long showers are no problem. Neither are splashes or full dunks in soapy bathwater. The speaker keeps playing, and the sealed charging port keeps moisture and rust out. As a dedicated shower or poolside speaker, it does the job most people buy it for. For most buyers, therefore, the sealing alone earns the purchase.

A couple of asterisks apply. The unit floats, but its sound drops off noticeably when it sits in water. So it's a survives-the-pool speaker, not a plays-from-the-middle-of-the-pool one. The lighter colorways also have a quirk. The white in particular can show faint darker mottling after prolonged steam exposure. It's purely cosmetic and doesn't affect function. Even so, none of this dents its core shower duty. For the bathroom, kitchen, beach, or boat, the waterproofing is the real deal rather than a spec-sheet boast.

Connectivity and the multipoint headache

Pairing is painless. To a phone, the Select 4 Go connects on the first try. It then holds a stable Bluetooth link across a typical home. Meanwhile, range stays solid through walls and across rooms. In some cases, it reaches out to the driveway without dropping. For streaming from a single phone, connectivity is a non-issue.

The trouble starts with more than one device. The speaker's multipoint behavior is aggressive. Say someone whose phone paired before walks back into range. If they start any audio, the speaker can grab the connection away from you. Worse, it then fails to hand control back gracefully. In a shared household, that becomes a small daily negotiation. Someone opens TikTok, and your music vanishes. Voice-assistant commands routed through a phone can also knock the link loose. The only reliable workaround is to forget the speaker after each session. That shouldn't be necessary.

Two more limits deserve a flag. Pairing to a PC or laptop is noticeably less stable than to a phone. The audio there can turn patchy. TWS stereo pairing works well between two matched units. However, it won't bridge across production batches. Buy a second one months later, and it may refuse to pair with your first. Anker ties the quirk to the serial number. None of this breaks the speaker for single-phone use. Still, the connection management is its least refined part.

Battery life and charging

On paper, the Select 4 Go is rated for 20 hours. At the low-to-moderate volumes it's designed for, that figure is realistic. Many people charge it about once a week. A full top-up over USB-C takes a few hours.

The number to watch is volume. Run it loud, and the battery drains far faster. Expect closer to six hours at max, and a few units land lower. After a long workday at mid volume, you'll have plenty left. After an afternoon cranked at a pool party, you won't. That's normal physics for a small speaker driven hard. But the 20-hour headline only holds at conversational levels. Still, at sensible levels, that endurance genuinely impresses.

The bigger miss is feedback. There's no battery percentage reported to your phone. There's no spoken low-battery warning either. You're left reading a single status LED. When the charge runs out, the speaker just shuts off without notice. For a branded device, that's a cheap-feeling omission. Even so, a glance at the LED becomes second nature. You only notice it when the music dies mid-song.

App, features, and value

The Soundcore app is the feature hub, and it's a genuine value-add here. Alongside preset EQ modes, it offers a fully customizable equalizer. It also adds a configurable auto-off timer and a volume cap. That cap is handy when a kid or toddler is the main user. Custom EQ on a budget speaker is rare. It meaningfully extends what the single driver can do.

Notably, the app isn't mandatory. That's good, because it's a heavyweight download. Some users would rather skip it on privacy grounds. The speaker works fine on its out-of-the-box controls. So the app is a bonus, not a gatekeeper. That's a smarter setup than rivals that lock EQ behind a required install.

On value, the math is straightforward. In its budget bracket, the Select 4 Go delivers waterproofing, battery life, and app control that usually cost more. For instance, it outclasses the tinny speakers built into laptops. It also sounds better than many older speakers buyers are upgrading from. It won't out-muscle a larger speaker like Soundcore's own Boom 2. It's also not the speaker for a party. As a rugged, do-everything personal speaker, though, it's one of the stronger picks in its class. The compromises are in convenience, not in the core job.

Final Verdict

The Soundcore Select 4 Go is an easy recommendation for one specific buyer. Picture someone who wants a tough, truly waterproof speaker for the shower, kitchen, or outdoors. They care more about durability and value than audiophile sound. It nails the basics. The IP67 sealing holds up. The battery lasts all day at sensible volumes. The sound is punchy for its size. And the app EQ stays rare at this price. The trade-offs are real, though. The buttons are flat and impossible to work by feel. The Bluetooth multipoint gets clumsy in shared homes. And the battery life shrinks at high volume. Go in knowing those, and it's a lot of speaker for the money.