Apple is late to the consumer priced smart speaker market, but it finally joined Amazon and Google with the $99 HomePod Mini. Here's what you need to know: The Mini is way smaller in size than both the new Amazon Echo fourth generation speaker and Google Nest Audio. And while it doesn't sound as great for music as either of them, (it is way smaller, after all) in our unscientific home ears test, it probably doesn't matter. This is a really useful speaker for anyone living in the Apple ecosystem and it makes the Siri personal assistant way more competitive with Amazon's Alexa and the Google Assistant. The HomePod Mini sounds fantastic as a TV speaker.

Apple's HomePod mini is finally here – the iPhone maker's attempt to break the Amazon Echo-Google Home duopoly and put itself back into the voice assistant race. The HomePod mini costs £99 and sits below the full-sized HomePod costing £279. The speaker looks like a smaller, more spherical version of the big HomePod from almost three years ago. The outside is covered in a recycled plastic fabric mesh and there is a touch-sensitive disc at the top with a coloured LED display that lights up and pulsates as you interact with its voice assistant, Siri. It is an attractive object that is smaller and less prominent than its primary competition, the equally new Amazon Echo and Google Nest Audio.