After years of being dedicated to Wi-Fi only, multi room audio systems, Sonos last week announced its first ever portable speaker with both Wi-Fi and Bluetooth, in the Sonos Move. What's behind the sudden move into a new category? The customers wanted it.
“The original Play:5 has a port on the back, and people would use it as a handle to bring it outside,” says Sonos product manager Sarah Morris, discussing findings from the company's research into user habits. “That's not what it's for, but okay. And so we had to think about a bunch of different things, like, how do we go outside the home?”
The Move acts like a regular Sonos speaker, but can be carried around and use Bluetooth if you’re out of Wi-Fi range.
Although a portable speaker and an outdoor speaker have been the most requested things from customers for ten years, it was the Bluetooth holding them back until now, adds chief commercial officer Matt Siegel.
“[Bluetooth]'s got some advantages in terms of ease of use, but it has a lot of disadvantages in terms of the quality of the connection, and how your phone calls would suddenly show up on the speaker,” he says. “There's just some things about the experience that aren't as premium as what Sonos wanted.”
But, once the folks at Sonos realised that they had most kinds of indoor speakers covered, a move toward solving the Bluetooth problem seemed inevitable.
“We finally got to a point where we had tackled all the biggest, hardest problems in the home. That's not to say there's not a tonne of cool stuff we have to still do in the home. But it was definitely time to go into this next phase, which starts taking us out of the home," Siegel says.
“Now, I think as we go out of home, you have to start tackling Bluetooth, because you can't obviously have Wi-Fi everywhere that you go."
The result is that the Move uses Wi-Fi when it can, complete with Sonos app, voice assistant and Apple Play functionality, but can also connect directly to your phone via Bluetooth with the press of a button. While the success of the $649 portable speaker remains to be seen, Sonos' exploration of Bluetooth opens up some exciting prospects for the future.
“We're certainly looking at all the different ways that people experience sound in their lives. Headphones is one of those totally logical categories that you could imagine Sonos going into," Siegel says.
"We aren't ready to make any sort of forward-looking product roadmap statements before their time, but we're certainly closely looking at the whole range of headphones and portables."
The Move has a handle around back for easy lifting.Credit:
That Sonos would consider headphones is emblematic of a shif in focus for the company, which a decade ago was adamant about challenging the move towards private listening. Siegel says Sonos has a much broader view of sound these days.
“In the two years I've been [at Sonos], it's been a way more agnostic approach to sound experience, which is really studying the true habits and behaviours of our consumers all over the world,” he says.
Above all, though, Siegel says the focus is on premium sound.
“You see a lot of things that are coming out that feel a little bit more like disposable devices," he says.
"A lot devices that I see are really not speakers first, they're actually Trojan horse strategies for companies trying to get voice services into people's homes."
Along with Move, Sonos last week announced a version of its One speaker that removes the Google Assistant and Amazon Alexa functionality, as well a way to connect your old record player to your multi-room system. After that, it all depends on what the people want.
The author travelled to New York as a guest of Sonos.
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