Bose Portable Home Speaker Silver

I've had this speaker for a week or so now and I'm quite happy with it. I travel a lot internationally for work and where my Bose Soundtouch Portable used to be my (rather heavy) regular travel companion, it is now the Portable Home speaker.

The ladies and gentlemen of Bose have again delivered a beautiful design: a very nice-looking speaker, which is very stable and solid, yet lightweight. The sound quality is also impressive: especially for a portable speaker, it produces a very acceptable sound; I find it particularly striking how the sound profile of the speaker adapts to the location where it is located. The connection via Wi-Fi is excellent, even if the bandwidth is a bit less; playback via Bluetooth also gives a good result (for Bluetooth), although the quality is slightly less (but barely audible). The battery goes from full to empty in about 8 hours of use over Wi-Fi at medium volume; slightly longer via Bluetooth.

Also very clever: you can connect the speaker to a second wireless speaker (via Bluetooth or Wi-Fi) and this leads to a nice stereo result -- at least, if one is also a Bose speaker, because somehow way (with a feedback loop through the microphone, maybe?) they've made sure that the ever-present delay on Bluetooth is completely inaudible. With a speaker from another brand, it remains to be seen whether this works, but in the worst case you have a tenth of a second delay on the second speaker.

The built-in Google Assistant works perfectly and after a day of getting used to my voice, it recognizes every command. I have not tried the (also built-in) Alexa.

Also standard for Bose: their software is another problem. The speaker can only stream a limited number of services (here in the Netherlands currently Spotify, Deezer, Amazon, and a crippled version of TuneIn) so for other services you have to rely on Bluetooth. Their app is poorly designed and not particularly user-friendly. To connect to another WiFi network you have to go through quite a few steps and it also takes quite a long time.

Also very irritating: every time you turn off the speaker (or it turns itself off after an hour of inactivity) you lose the connection with the second speaker, which you then have to manually restore, including balance. It's a shame that such a nice product is hampered by the software.

All in all, still highly recommended for mobile use; and who knows, maybe one day Bose will learn to make software...