Thoughts on Apple's HomePod

By Gadjo Cardenas Sevilla

San Jose, California - Apple's newest product category since the Apple Watch in 2015 (or, it can be argued, since the EarPods last year) is their HomePod speaker revealed here a few days ago and which is coming to the US in December (with mid-2018 availability in Canada likely).

In typical Apple fashion, the company comes rather late into a market that's already quite mature. Amazon's Echo can be credited for creating the connected speaker/voice assistant space, and it's a huge seller in the US, Amazon's even expanded their product line to smaller Dot speakers as well as licensing Echo across various OEMs, including high-end speaker brands.

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WWDC 2017: Apple enters smart speaker space with HomePod

Text and photos by Gadjo Cardenas Sevilla

San Jose, CA - Apple gave delegates to its yearly WWDC (World Wide Developers Conference) a sneak peek at their new HomePod smart home speaker. At just under 7 inches tall, HomePod represents years of hardware and software innovation at Apple, including spatial awareness that allows HomePod to sense its location in a room and automatically adjust the audio to deliver a great music experience, a large, Apple-designed woofer and a custom array of seven beam-forming tweeters.

“Apple reinvented portable music with iPod and now HomePod will reinvent how we enjoy music wirelessly throughout our homes,” said Philip Schiller, Apple’s senior vice president of Worldwide Marketing. “HomePod packs powerful speaker technology, Siri intelligence and wireless access to the entire Apple Music library into a beautiful speaker"

Coming to the US and UK in December, HomePod is powered by an Apple A8 processor, it integrates Siri, has access to Apple Music's 40 million song library and can also control IoT and connected home devices by serving ans a HomeKit hub.

Review: Philips Hue Smart Lighting System

Philips Hue turns the lightbulb completely on its head and manages to bring such a vast range of possibility in terms of lighting homes, offices, commercial spaces and any place that's in need of smart illumination.

By Gadjo Cardenas Sevilla

One of the most impressive implementations of smart appliances or IoT (Internet of Things) has been by Philips, whose Hue line of smart lightbulbs, bridges, and switches, has all but revolutionized one of the oldest and most immutable devices and made it into a connected and smart appliance.

Lightbulbs are the oldest electrical devices. They're also the dumbest. You buy the lightbulb in the wattage you need, screw it into the socket and let it work until it dies, and then gets replaced. The cycle is endless.

If you want coloured lightbulbs, you buy them in the colours you need. Each lightbulb is one colour, forever. Not anymore. Read on.

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Google Home brings the fight to Amazon Alexa

Google Home is taking the fight to Amazon Alexa with a slew of new features including its own calling feature (as we reported earlier). What’s more, Google Home now also gets access to the free tier service of Spotify and support for SoundCloud and Deezer, among other music and radio services. The smart speaker now also supports HBO Now, Crackle, and Hulu. Google also adds Bluetooth connectivity from any compatible device, including the iPhone.

Aside from these, one of the new big features is what the company calls Proactive Assistance. Google Home will identify important information you might want to know and as the name suggests, it will light up on its own to let you know that it has something to tell you. An example shown at Google I/O demo was that it’ll alert you if you need to leave a bit earlier because of traffic in your area. Google promises to roll out these features slowly and will add more capabilities over time.

Source: BGR