Whyd aiming to compete with amazon echo by releasing smart speaker
Amazon’s Echo made controlling music with your voice easy-peasy, but its sound quality could be a lot better.
Enter Whyd, an Apple-esque voice-controlled speaker that claims to offer better sound than the Echo, though it lacks all of the smart home functionality of Amazon’s product. Its speaker promises louder, clearer omnidirectional sound through its four 40mm full-range drivers, 100mm subwoofer and ported high-pass enclosure for deep bass.
Two Whyd speakers can be paired for stereo sound, and multiple speakers can be synced for multi-room audio. It supports Bluetooth, Wi-Fi and AirPlay.
Compared to the Echo, which only supports a handful of music services like Amazon Music, Spotify, Pandora and iHeartRadio, the Whyd works with practically every major music streaming service, including Apple Music, Tidal, Soundcloud, Deezer and Google Play Music.
The Whyd plays sound, but it also promises to listen. Using five microphones with built-in noise cancellation, the speaker can hear you bark commands at it from 16 feet away, according to the company.
As for design, the Whyd is taller and significantly wider than the Echo at 11.5 x 7.5-inches. It’s also heavier at 8.38 pounds versus the Echo’s 2.3 pounds.
Whyd works with practically every major music streaming service
Located on the top of the elegant speaker is a curved touch panel made of glass. Touch panel controls work as you’d expect: tap to play/pause, double-tap to favorite a song, swipe left and right to skip between previous and next track, and pinch-and-zoom with two fingers to control volume.
Amazon got a head start with its Echo and surprised the entire tech industry with the Echo and Alexa, but Google’s coming up in its rearview mirror later this year with its Google Home.
We’ll have to wait until we hear the Whyd before we can say if it sounds any better than the Echo, but at the very least the speaker comes in five different colors compared to the Echo’s black-only design.
The Whyd retails for $499 and ships in early 2017, but if you pre-order the company will slash $200 off.
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