Have a cigar. There’s a new baby in the Bose smart speaker line. The Bose Home Speaker 300 is the littlest and least pricey of four models in a rapidly expanding talk-to-me speaker family first announced in August 2018.
The 300’s kinship to its siblings is unmistakable in both industrial design and performance. If you relish Bose’s signature sound, you’ll be happy to bring this newborn home—especially if you’ve already bought something else in the lineup and you’re looking to build out a Bose-based multi-room audio system.
Be forewarned: Leading a product line with a small, affordable, affable performer is often a maker’s best strategy to lure you into investing in the rest of its product line. If at first it does succeed, you’ll shop, shop again—perhaps for a bigger-voiced, slightly brighter-sounding Home Speaker 500. Or for one of Bose’s well-received smart soundbars—the Bose Soundbar 500 or the larger Bose Soundbar 700—to cumulatively fill your house with synchronized (or disparate) sound.
Jonathan Takiff / IDGThe baby Bose Home Speaker 300 (left) doesn’t fall far from the bush that gave us the Home Speaker 500 (right.)
That customer-nurturing strategy has worked well for Sonos, who uses its smallest and least-expensive Sonos One as the initial lure. And that’s clearly the rival that Bose is gunning for with the similarly sized Home Speaker 300. Both speakers offer the choice of either Amazon Alexa or Google Assistant for calling out song and station requests, asking for the news, checking the weather, and ordering merchandise, as well as casting such smart-home charms as dimming the lights, adjusting the thermostat, and closing the garage door (provided you have the requisite gear, of course).
Bose’s offering is priced $60 higher than the Sonos One, but it offers a few features Sonos doesn’t: Most notably six station/album/podcast/playlist preset buttons, and Bluetooth connectivity. Those…
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