Sonos Roam: cheaper, multi-room portable smart speaker launched

The wireless home-audio specialist Sonos has unveiled the Roam, its smaller, cheaper portable speaker with Bluetooth and wifi that works as well at home as it does outdoors. The rugged triangular Roam weighs 430g and is about the size of a water bottle. The aim is that it will avoid ending up stuck in a drawer collecting dust like most portable speakers by sounding good enough and working well enough to warrant being used at home too, connecting to Sonos' smart multi-room wifi system. That means it will work like any other non-battery powered Sonos speaker able to stream music directly via wifi from more than 100 different music services, including Spotify and Apple Music, and be grouped with other speakers to play music all over the home. It also supports Apple's AirPlay 2 and smart speaker functionality with either Google Assistant and Amazon's Alexa. The Roam has separate woofer and tweeter speakers with Sonos's Trueplay technology, which automatically tunes the sound accounting for acoustics, obstacles and position to sound its best at all times.