Smart speakers are honestly one of the hottest topics right now. We got things from Apple coming up pretty soon called the HomePod and this is Google’s take of a larger speaker system with their own built-in assistant for the market. This is the Google Home Max. As you can basically see, it’s a ginormous speaker with the Google Assistant built-in. So let’s go ahead and give it an unboxing. The great thing is, I picked this up right before the Apple HomePod releases so I’ll definitely have a comparison video between the HomePod and the Google Home Max pretty shortly as soon as that comes out.

On the front of this Google Home Max box is a little pull tab, kind of Apple-esque in terms of unboxing. So let’s go ahead and flip it over to this side and we will open up the box. It’s really well padded on the inside of the box and here is our Google Home Max.

I got the space gray color. It looks pretty sleek. On the top, we have a little sticker that tells you how to raise the volume, play, and pause. It might be confusing if you don’t see that but it’s pretty self-explanatory: the middle is play/pause and the sides are the volumes. And then you also have your plug for the wall to plug this in. And that’s about it. There’s a little booklet here, Let’s get started, plug in, and get the Google app and the Get to Know Your Google Home Max and be safe-- all that warranty stuff.

Let’s go ahead and take a look at the speaker.

First of all, this thing is pretty heavy. It’s not a light piece of speaker. Ideally, you’d like to put it down horizontally if you have one speaker. But you could also put it vertically. If you have several of these, you can definitely set it up in a dual mode-- one as a left channel, one as a right channel if you have two of these. They are pretty expensive costing at $399, which is $50 more expensive than the Apple HomePod. And then on the bottom here, you have this magnetic plate. It’s a heavy piece of plate that you just put on the bottom here and then hopefully will reduce any kind of vibration on any surface it’s on.

I’ve got everything connected already. It’s pretty easy. All you have to do is download Google Home application, have it search for and automatically connects under Wi-Fi network, link whatever accounts you want. It did a quick, little update that took about 2 minutes to update and then it said it was ready to go.

It basically works the same way as your basic Google Assistant but obviously, this thing is really meant for music. First of all, the controls are pretty simple. There’s a little, tiny lighter portion on the top of the Google Home speaker, the Home Max speaker and that’s basically your play and pause. If you slide it to the right, it’s volume up. If you slide it to the left, it’s volume down. You can also just tell it what to do. On the back here, there’s also a little mute switch if you don’t want it to listen to you anymore. I have it linked to my Spotify account so I can have it play anything on my Spotify account. It’s pretty simple to operate.

Overall, I think the sound is pretty good. Obviously, I have to listen to it some more before I give you a full review. Maybe just bring that into comparison between the Google Home Max and the Apple HomePod. But overall, it looks like a pretty cool device. It definitely looks a little bit bigger than the Apple HomePod so I’m definitely very interested in seeing which one really sounds the best.