The HomePod is available for pre-order set to be released this week, but it's already sold out in some countries, MacRumors first spotted. Apple began taking pre-orders for its latest product on Jan. 26 in the U.S., U.K. and Australia. The company had revealed the speaker in June and promised to deliver the gadget by December, but was forced to delay the device. The $349 HomePod is set to hit stores this Friday. Delivery for the HomePod is still scheduled for Feb. 9 for people who pre-order their speaker today in the United States.

At long last, Apple's HomePod is here--or reviews of it are, at least. The HomePod, Apple's answer to the Amazon Echo and Google Home, begins shipping on Friday, but early reviews of the $349 smart home speaker began making the rounds Tuesday morning. The initial verdict, it would appear, is decidedly mixed. The smart speaker faces stiff competition from Amazon and Google's product lines, which have both been available for multiple years and experienced booming sales in recent months. However, Apple has positioned its entrant as not just a voice-based smart home assistant but as a high-end audio device and musical companion.

"Hey Siri, why should I buy a HomePod?" If you were to ask that question a few months ago, the answer may have been more clear. When Apple unveiled its $349 Siri-equipped HomePod speaker in June, it was poised to fill a big hole in the smart speaker market. While the Amazon Echo and Google Home were pretty good at answering questions, they wouldn't blow anybody away when it came to audio quality. Apple, then, pitched its smart speaker as a piece of high-end audio gear aimed at music aficionados, with Siri on board as a bonus. But the HomePod, which finally starts shipping this week, was delayed for several months.

In a world where we don't always know how our personal information is being used by tech companies, it's hard to know which of them to trust--especially with "always listening" devices like Amazon's Echo. Fortunately, Amazon is not always listening to you. Instead, Echo listens for the key phrase, "Alexa," and then starts recording. These recordings are attached to your account and you can go and clear your history at any time. Amazon Echo and Echo Dot use on-device keyword spotting to detect the wake word.

USA Today's reporter Erin Jensen puts her sense of style and self-esteem to the test using Amazon's Echo Look wardrobe critiquing technology. A link has been posted to your Facebook feed. USA Today's reporter Erin Jensen puts her sense of style and self-esteem to the test using Amazon's Echo Look wardrobe critiquing technology.

With less than 72 hours until its release, the first HomePod reviews are in from a hand-picked group of media outlets, and they're very positive--as long as you're buying Apple's $349 smart speaker for sound quality. The Homepod's "smarts," though, leave much to be desired. That's not a total surprise, since Siri is woefully inadequate on other devices and Apple hadn't given us any indication that it has enhanced Siri for HomePod. But in action it's even worse than we expected. Brian X. Chen of The New York Times laments Siri's capabilities on the new speaker and concludes that "Siri doesn't even work as well on HomePod as it does on the iPhone."

HomePod may be a latecomer on the smart loudspeaker scene but Apple's entry onto the dance floor is about to liven up the party. At least for well-heeled Apple diehards who share my passion for all kinds of music. If you fit that description and are willing to fork over $349 plus embrace the subscription-only Apple Music streaming service, HomePod is well worth the wait, an outcome I reached after testing the speaker for just shy of a week. Apple makes no bones that HomePod is a music-first speaker, and it sounds terrific, all the more notable given how small it is. Vocals were pure, bass deep. At the same time, the new speaker can be an exercise in frustration at times, especially when you request something of Siri that Apple's digital assistant can't deliver on HomePod.

The HomePod speaker is photographed in a a showroom during an announcement of new products at the Apple Worldwide Developers Conference Monday, June 5, 2017, in San Jose, Calif. You can almost detect the reverberations in and around Cupertino, Calif., as Apple prepares to start selling its expensive and delayed HomePod speaker with Siri in stores Friday. Its first smart speaker enters a three-year-old market where first mover Amazon now drowns out its rivals with an estimated 70% share. Amazon's Alexa digital assistant and Google Assistant, the voice of the year-old Google Home, have trained tens of millions of consumers to equate smart speakers with the ability to answer a broad set of requests in an increasingly human-like way. Apple, in contrast, is going all in on music -- defending a price tag that's about $250 more than the basic Amazon Echo by touting its premium audio specs and integration with Apple music ecosystem, rather than the number of ways digital assistant Siri can insert itself into your life. "We never wanted to lose the focus that (HomePod is) first about making a speaker that plays back music in a surprising really great way," Apple's senior vice president for worldwide marketing Phil Schiller said moments after leading a tour of journalists through a working audio testing lab where acoustic and engineering teams first started working on HomePod a half-dozen years ago.

The Apple HomePod is Apple's smart hi-fi speaker, with a big emphasis on hi-fi quality audio. So how does it look and sound, and exactly how smart is it? We've been using the HomePod for the last week. It manages to be good-looking without dominating, perhaps because it's so compact, which means that you can put it in most rooms and barely notice it's there. It comes in two colours: white and space grey. The mesh finish is a soft-touch cover that's pleasing to the touch and acoustically transparent.

Joshua Montgomery, CEO of Mycroft AI, has a bone to pick with Amazon Alexa, the voice-controlled digital helper that companies such as Toyota, Ford and BMW have integrated into vehicles. "Even though [the car] may run a voice assistant from a tech company, you can't use it to check what the tire pressure is," Montgomery said. He turned his gripe into an idea: an independent, white-label digital assistant that automakers can customize for use in their vehicles. Last year, the startup honed the product by putting it into a Jaguar F-Type test vehicle at Jaguar Land Rover's tech incubator in Portland, Ore. Now, nestled amongst dozens of startups at CES 2018's Eureka Park, Montgomery was courting carmakers, pitching freedom from Silicon Valley's dominant positioning.