The HomePod speaker from Apple is expected to be released on the 9th of February, which means that we’re still a couple of weeks or so away from it being available. However in a post on Refinery29 (via 9to5Mac), it seems that they’ve managed to get an early hands-on review of the device.
The review claims that they managed to spend an hour with the HomePod which gave them a better idea of what the speaker could do and how it would sound like. The latter is of interest to many especially when you consider that when Apple launched them, the actual units that were shown off were not exactly usable and seemed mostly there for photo opps.
Moving on, the review claims that compared to the other smart speakers in the market suc has the Amazon Echo, Google Home Max, and the Sonos One, the HomePod sounded the best. They claim that vocals sounded crisper and clearer, and the bass has a nice thump that one might expect. Of course how it handles compared to other speakers remains to be seen, but at least Apple appears to be delivering on their promise.
The review also confirms support for multiple users, but the support is limited in the sense that only the person who actually sets up the speakers will be able to get detailed information from notifications, reminders, send text messages, and so on. This is a limitation when you consider that other smart speakers such as Google Home and Amazon Echo can recognize different voices and offer up personalized content.
In any case it’s probably too early to tell how well the speakers will do, so we guess we’ll just have to wait for the next couple of weeks to find out.