Bose has announced its new confusingly named Portable Home Speaker, a wireless boombox that has Google Assistant and Amazon Alexa voice assistant support. The contradicting name suggests you can move it around the house, but that you might not want to lug it to the park.
The £329 speaker boasts 360 degree sound and goes up for pre-order on 19 September in black or silver/white.
So far, so HomePod. But the battery power means you can lug the music with you wherever you go unlike most of the smart speakers on the market from Apple, Amazon, Sonos or Google.
At 1.06kg the speaker shouldn’t weigh too heavy in the bags of those looking for excellent sound quality. Often the downfall of cheaper Bluetooth speakers is their compromise in audio quality for portability. Bose reckons its nailed it here, though you are paying a premium for the brand. Hopefully top performance will follow.
As a Bluetooth speaker it means you can play anything from your phone or tablet. But Google Assistant and Alexa support means you can ask the speaker to play certain songs, albums or playlists to your linked Spotify account, while AirPlay 2 means you can play music off your iPhone or iPad.
Bose claims the Portable Home Speaker has “deeper bass than any other portable smart speaker its size” and can go for 12 hours on a charge. If this is the case we don’t see any reason why you wouldn’t want to take it on a day trip, so long as everyone else in the park likes to hear the low-end frequencies of your Top 40 playlist from a mile away.
The Portable Home Speaker goes on sale in the UK on 3 October.
Author: Henry Burrell, Phones Editor
Henry is Tech Advisor’s Phones Editor, ensuring he and the team covers and reviews every smartphone worth knowing about for readers and viewers all over the world. He spends a lot of time moving between different handsets and shouting at WhatsApp to support multiple devices at once.