HomePod Mini Review.

When buying a HomePod mini it is important to understand what you are buying before you commit to the purchase. Me on the other hand? Well, I simply jumped head first into the purchase in order to give you some realistic perspective of this product.
So, what did I just buy and was it worth the $149.00 I spent on the device? Possibly...
Now I say possibly for two reasons. I originally bought this device not fully understanding the purposes of the device before hand. In my mind I had the device I wanted with a short list of expectations I was hoping for and than once I received the product there was the product that I got. And to take things straight to the point. The product I got was not the product I was expecting.
Turns out I may have been demanding too much from the HomePod mini. This lead me to having great expectations. Which lead me to having unfulfilled expectations. Which in return left me feeling completely underwhelmed by the home pod mini.
What did I want from a device such as a smart speaker in the first place. Well, that’s simple enough. I was hoping to have a smart speaker that was capable of communicating with the apple assistant Siri. I was also hoping to have a Bluetooth speaker capable of connecting to my phone to listen to music and YouTube on. I was also hoping to have a portable speaker that I could unplug and move around the house as I pleased.
So, what did I get with the HomePod I hear you eagerly asking?
Well, something quite different. The first gut punch came when I released the fact that I had to have this device plugged into the ac outlet at all times. There goes the portability I was looking for. This device was now going to be anchored to the wall unless I was willing to reboot the device each time I wished to move it. This was immediately a clear inconvenience. To me this was also a clear move from Apple which revealed its underlying desire to have you install one of these devices in each of the rooms you wished to use them in. Well, unfortunately for Apple we are not all Warren Buffet who in real life would probably simply hammer throw this device out his office window in a heart beat.
The second gut punch was the realisation that this device was in fact a wifi based speaker and not a Bluetooth speaker. What’s the downside to this I hear you ask? Well, connection issues of course. Wifi connections are great for steaming video connections as Bluetooth technology is currently incapable of handling the band width required to do this but when it comes to audio connections, something a smart speaker should be able to process with ease, there is no better connection than the reliability that Bluetooth has to offer. The HomePod mini is missing this. No Bluetooth connection means sometimes messy wifi connections. I have experienced this, especially when it comes to transferring YouTube to the speaker. It’s a neat trick, there’s no doubt about that. Simply tap your phone on top of the speaker and it should appear that your passing the audio from your phone to the speaker. But it’s an illusion. And not a very good one at that. The illusion is that you’re passing the audio from your phone to the device when what’s really happening is that you are forcing you HomePod to search and boot the video from the source and than start playing the video from where you have requested it to start. This is simply messy. Don’t get me wrong, sometimes the tap feature works flawlessly and when it does it is a thing of beauty but often there is a large delay in transferring the audio, resulting in a paused video or un-synced video vs audio issues. This was enough to frustrate me to the point of almost returning the product.
The third and final gut punch is the fact that the volume control from my iPhone to the HomePod mini is all out of whack. This simple request should be the most basic of tasks. If I am listening to music on the HomePod mini and I’m using Apples very own music service to stream the music simply pressing up of the volume button should result in the volume being turned up on the speaker. But it’s never this straight forward. There is nearly always a lag. Or the device simply fails to change it’s volume altogether. Turning the volume down is also a problem. What your left with is a device that is disconnected from the world, doing pretty much whatever the hell it pleases. This was one of the more frustrating aspects of this device. HomePod mini was supposed to be a device that you as the user could control, instead what we got was a somewhat Lunky, laggy disconnected mess. I find myself asking what the hell happened?
Now for the positives.
The speaker looks neat and it sounds fantastic. The speaker is an Apple product, so it has that going for it and it is somewhat smart as it will allow you to access your internet of things throughout your house. But in saying this so will your phone. Unfortunately that’s about all the positives I can muster up. I’m simply disappointed by what Apple has produced and I’m normally an adamant Apple supporter.
The problem with the HomePod mini is simple enough. Apple should have had the foresight to know what it’s customers wanted. Instead it held back certain features in what can only be suggested as a blatant attempt to bolster marketing options in the future. It shouldn’t have been so difficult. It shouldn’t have forced customers to purchase a product with obvious room for improvement. No one wants to buy room for improvement.
So what did we want? This is simple enough as well.
We wanted a Bluetooth and wifi speaker. That streams music flawlessly like so many other speakers are capable of doing these days.
We want a speaker that can be moved around the house without having to connect the damn thing to the wall!
And we want a speaker that can sync to our Apple TV’s without an issue and we want to be able to turn the volume up and down without having to get into a verbal bitch fight with Siri over the task.
I don’t believe we are asking for too much?
Simply don’t hold out on us.
Anyways, that’s my thoughts on what should have been a top product. Sad really.