JBL Charge 5 Wi‑Fi

The JBL Charge 5 Wi-Fi is the Wi-Fi version of one of the best-selling portable Bluetooth speakers ever made. The addition matters: with Wi-Fi it becomes an AirPlay 2 speaker and can join a multi-room group, which a Bluetooth speaker never can.

It keeps the Charge’s usual characteristics, including IP67 dust and water protection and a battery that also charges a phone from the speaker’s USB socket.

What Apple Home actually does with it

This is an AirPlay 2 speaker rather than a HomeKit accessory.

• It appears in the Home app as a speaker you can play to, and as an AirPlay target in Control Centre.
• You can assign it to a room and group it with HomePods for synchronised multi-room audio.
• Siri can send music to it by room name.
• It can be the audio output in a scene or an automation.

You cannot switch it on or set its volume from the Home app the way you would a light. Those stay with the speaker itself and its own app.

Away from Wi-Fi it reverts to Bluetooth and disappears from Apple Home until it is back on the network.

Before you buy

This is the sensible size for actual portability, unlike the larger Boombox 3.

Check you are buying the Wi-Fi version. The plain Charge 5 is Bluetooth only, looks almost identical, and will not work with Apple Home at all.

Specifications