Thank you again for your comments, I ended up going to both BestBuy and Bose to listen to their products, keeping in mind the recommendations form this thread.
I probably forgot to mention that the purchase was a gift for my daughter 15th birthday and her taste is less discriminating than mine and since she will be taking it to the beach, pools, school and on trips, it has to be more durable than audiophile quality.
After listening to the Bose and JBL units, I agree that the Soundlink Mini probably sounded the best, but two thing drove me away from it. First, the add ons. If you buy the Bose Mini, you have to pay extra for a rubber sleeve that goes around it and even the employee at the Bose store said that the sleeve was awkward and hard to put on. The sleeve costs an additional $25 or so. Then to get a case, you need to spend an extra $45 (or so), so you could have a canvas/cloth bag to carry the unit and the charger. Also, I listed to the Bose pre-programmed music and was thoroughly impressed with the sound, but then the Bose rep allowed me to sync a unit to my iPhone and I played several songs, including Jungle by Jamie N Commons and it sounded very distorted at a high volume. The rest of my play list sounded terrific, however at this point my mind was already made up. So ultimately, probably out of principal more than anything, I walked out of the Bose Store and into the Apple store and bought............'
..............a UE Boom. The Boom comes with a protective coating and seemed to be more ready for mobile use than the Soundlink Mini and while I really liked the JBL Charge, for some reason the UE Boom sounded just a little bit better to me. When my daughter opened the gift for her birthday, she could not have been more excited and for several hours had an impromptu dance party with her sister and her girlfriends. So for her, this really was the perfect choice. Another cool feature with the Boom is that when you download the UE Boom App, you can "double" them up and play two at one time, in mono or stereo mode. While I am not sure that is a feature we will ever use, it is a nice concept. Syncing via blue tooth was simple, music played well and commends responded well, as did EQ settings.