There's a new, cheaper way to buy a Sonos wifi speaker and it's from Ikea. The Symfonisk bookshelf speaker is the second of two new products born of a partnership between the Swedish furniture manufacturer Ikea and the American premium multiroom audio specialists Sonos. Together with the five-star Symfonisk table lamp, the new bookshelf speaker – the size of two hardback books – takes Ikea's design knowledge and slaps Sonos's best-in-class wifi speaker platform into it. The result is a new, lower-priced entry point into the Sonos ecosystem costing just £99 and undercutting the Sonos Play:1 by £50. Where the table lamp is more obviously a piece of furniture, the bookshelf speaker is a more traditional audio product, at least on the surface.

If you make a purchase by clicking one of our links, we may earn a small share of the revenue. However, our picks and opinions are independent from USA TODAY's newsroom and any business incentives. Slim front pocket wallets are a great gift for any guy. If the guy in your life still uses a bulky wallet, a slim front-pocket option is a huge upgrade. This leather one comes in a wide range of colors, is affordable, and has great reviews.

The 25 best gifts for men that they'll actually want (Photo: Reviewed.com) If you make a purchase by clicking one of our links, we may earn a small share of the revenue. However, our picks and opinions are independent from USA TODAY's newsroom and any business incentives. Shopping for guys can be tricky business. Though "traditional" men's gifts--think neckties and whiskey stones--seem like safe bets, in truth, men have a wide variety of tastes and those "safe" gifts rarely get real use.

Google's big, premium Apple HomePod rival the Home Max is finally being released in the UK today, bringing Google Assistant to the high-end smart speaker market. Announced in October 2017 and on sale in the US since November, the Home Max joins Google's smaller Home and smallest Home Mini smart speakers as the big one. Google Assistant sorts voice commands, controls and questions exactly the same as Google's smaller smart speaker offerings, but the way it sounds couldn't be more different. The Home Max is relatively large box speaker, by smart speaker standards, with a white or black smooth plastic body and grey or charcoal coloured fabric front. In white and grey it's simple fabric front and rounded corners make the Home Max look a bit bland up next to a Sonos Play:5 or an Apple HomePod, but it might be easier to blend in with soft home furnishings.

Apple planted its HomePod smart speaker deep inside a walled garden: You must have an Apple-branded mobile device just to set it up, and you can pretty much use it only with Apple's own services if you want voice control for music. The company then adds insult to injury by leaving its older iPhones, iPads, and iPods outside that garden wall. Unless you're an ardent Apple fan who upgrades to new iOS devices with relative frequency, you won't even be able to set up a HomePod. If you own an iPhone, iPad, or iPod model that Apple essentially rendered obsolete last fall when it established the hardware requirements for iOS 11, you're out of luck. You can stream music from various devices to a HomePod using AirPlay, but not until you've set up the speaker using an iOS device running iOS 11 or higher.

Getting a review unit late, as is the case with the Google Home Max, gives me the benefit of reading a lot of people's opinions of a product before I formulate my own. And reviewing a lot of similar speakers before I evaluate the one at hand gives me a broad base of experience upon which to formulate mine. Based on those two fronts, the Google Home Max has been praised just a wee bit overenthusiastically. That said, the Google Home Max is the best smart speaker I've heard. Amazon certainly has nothing close to it in terms of audio performance, and neither do any of the manufacturers building Echo clones.

Smart speakers like the Amazon Echo and Google Home have proved useful -- but they tend not to sound very good. Sure, they're serviceable in a pinch, and are better than most cheap Bluetooth speakers, but they don't compare to options like the entire Sonos lineup, let alone a nice set of bookshelf speakers like the Audioengine A5 . That's slowly changing, though: The Alexa-powered Sonos One speaker performs well and is affordable, while Apple's forthcoming HomePod sounded excellent in a brief demo we saw earlier this year. Google's Home Max is the company's first attempt to join the HiFi audio space -- it does everything that the smaller Home speakers do, but with significantly larger and higher-caliber components. Of course, that higher quality comes at a significantly higher price. At $399, the Home Max is more comparable with dedicated, higher-quality speakers.

Google launched its high-quality Home Max speaker with Google Assistant in October, and the last we heard (via a Best Buy leak), it was set to arrive on December 11th. That date was spot on, it turns out, as the Home Max has indeed gone on sale at both Best Buy and Verizon. It's also live on Google's own online store. The Home Max speaker sports a pair of 4.5-inch high-excursion woofers and custom tweeters, putting it in the same class as serious audio products like the Sonos Play:5. We had a brief hands-on with it during the launch, under controlled conditions, and found it to be "extremely loud, well balanced and crystal clear, with well-defined bass."

If you make a purchase by clicking one of our links, we may earn a small share of the revenue. However, our picks and opinions are independent from USA TODAY's newsroom and any business incentives. Amazon's 12 Days of Deals continues on with a slew of offers for "music lovers, avid readers, and film buffs" and we've cherry-picked the best offers on the best products from the lineup. For the person you want to splurge on, tech is just the ticket. And whether they're the type who always has music playing, prefers reading to TV, or is obsessed with the latest technology, one of these things is sure to be the perfect fit.

Google is expected to announce some new devices next week on Oct. 4, including a smaller Google Home Mini. However, it looks like Google is also working on a different type of Google Home speaker that will apparently offer a high-end audio experience. Google is said to be developing a "premium" Google Home smart speaker. This version of the device will apparently be equipped with a set of stereo speakers and has the tentative name of Google Home "Max," according to 9To5Google. The idea behind the Google Home Max is that it will be the company's way of competing with the likes of the Sonos Play:3, which is able to deliver stereo sound with deeper bass for an immersive listening experience.