I’ve been aware of Sonos as a premium wireless speaker solution for a long time, but the price always seemed excessive for what, on the face of it, offers little more than a simple Bluetooth speaker. But after Subsonic needed its database rebuilding for the third time and I was unable to play music for a dinner party, enough was enough. I was willing at last to pay the premium for something that was purported to work.

Background

My music collection is mostly comprised of purchased Audio CDs that I have ripped under Linux. Currently I have a Music folder on our MythTV system, and have installed Subsonic to share our music to our many tablets and phones, using the excellent Subsonic Android App. If I want to play from Subsonic to my music system then I have a Logitech Bluetooth Audio Receiver Adapter that receives the audio and plays it through my old-school Sony amplifier.

The main issues with this set-up is that the music only plays in the living room and not elsewhere in the house. We have bought an additional Creative D80 Bluetooth Wireless Speaker, but of course each can only play independent streams.

I also find Bluetooth a frustrating technology where you don’t have a simple 1:1 paradigm. In our case we have probably a dozen tablets and phones, each determined to pair with the Bluetooth receivers and then prevent other devices from connecting.

Choosing Sonos Speakers

The Sonos range comprises of the small Play:1 at £155, a medium-sized Play:3 at £229 and a larger Play:5 at £413. On the Goldilocks principle of the middle one being “just right”, I opted for two of the Play:3 at £229 each - one for the living room and one for the kitchen. The plan was to move those elsewhere at a later stage and hopefully upgrade the living room system to a pair of Play:5 speakers.

The important thing to understand is that neither the Play:1 nor the Play:3 speakers have a Line-In. This means that you can only play from on-line content. If you currently subscribe to one of the supported Sonos Services, then that is fine, but if you’re wanting to play content from a CD or other input source - then you can’t. The Play:5 does have a Line-In, as does the Sonos Connect at £264.

A word about the Sonos Connect. A simple way to imagine it is that it is basically a Play:5, but without the speaker. In other words it has the same Sonos interface with Line-In but no speaker. If you have an existing music system then this is potentially ideal and with hindsight I wish that what I had done was to purchase one Play:3 for the kitchen and one Sonos Connect for the living room. The opposing view is that a pair of Play:5 speakers complete obsoletes an existing music system - so why not do away with the legacy equipment.

Amazon Prime Music

One great disappointment was that, whilst Sonos supports Amazon Music, it does not support Amazon Prime Music. One of the main reasons we had bought Sonos was to play Amazon Prime Music, so this was a major problem. At the time of writing it is available in the US as a Beta service and has been for a few months. One can only hope that it will trickle across to the UK in due course.

Google Play Music

Hoping that the Amazon Prime issue would be resolved, we signed up to a 30 day free trial with Google Play Music. This worked extremely well, except for the recommended playlists which do not appear as a Sonos Queue. The main issue we found was that our children would choose a song and click “Play Next” and this would interrupt the playlist - very irritating if you were enjoying a particular song. We assumed that this was a feature of Sonos, but Spotify does not work like that (see below).

Spotify

We then subscribed to the 30 days free trial with Spotify. You only need the individual member subscription to work with Sonos, but the ongoing cost is the same as Google Play. The only advantage of Spotify is that the recommended playlists appear as a proper Sonos queue, enabling you to save it as a Sonos Playlist, or add a song into the queue.

Subsonic

One delight was that we were able to play our local music via Subsonic. This is a Beta service and I did have a small problem getting it working. Unfortunately I cannot remember the nature of the problem, other than an Internet search solved it.

Conclusions

Obviously we were disappointed at the lack of Amazon Prime Music. I was also a little disappointed at the abrupt handling of music changes - if you click “Play Now” the music stops instantly and the next track starts. I do feel that with a premium set-up like this that music transitions should be handled more smoothly.

We also have had issues with our children messing about with Sonos - as the interface is open to all. We have sufficient control of our children that this isn’t a significant problem, but knowing some families this could be a serious issue. I do feel there should be some security, to enable clients to be de-authorised, or limited only to a subset of features.

Will I continue to invest in Sonos? Undoubtedly yes, but I think the next purchase will be a Sonos Connect followed by a better set of audio speakers.

This Christmas my wife bought me a Kindle Fire. Originally I wanted a Nexus 7, but was tempted by a Black Monday offer of £99 for the basic Fire (normally £129). There is also a more expensive HD version, which also has Dolby sound, for £159; but in my opinion you are getting dangerously close to Nexus 7 pricing at that point.

I am a great fan of the 7 inch form factor. Personally I would be embarrassed to carry around with me a 10” tablet, but the smaller book-sized 7” tablet is fine. Without a case, it will even fit into a suit jacket pocket.

My hope for the Fire was that it would be a quality device, being sold cheap as a loss leader for Amazon, but more to the point I hoped that it would still be usable for email and web browsing and that I would be able to find at least some of my favourite Android apps in the Amazon app store.

Opening it on Christmas day I was immediately pleased with the quality of the screen, which was bright with vibrant colours. The home screen was a disappointment, being a carousel style, which includes all the books bought from Amazon. Entries include your books and apps in what I assume is date last used. This may be a good layout for books, but the Fire is not an ebook reader and I would have preferred a traditional Android home screen. Also the web browser entry reflects the last website visited, which means that you don’t know what the entry looks like, nor where it is - as the sequence is in date last used. On the other hand pressing App on the menu seems to provide you with a list of the installed apps, so perhaps that’s not a major issue.

I knew that I was taking a risk with the Amazon app store, and certainly some of the apps that I was wanted were missing, for example Connectbot and Google+. That said it is possible to install from elsewhere so this may not be an insurmountable problem, and perhaps such apps will turn up eventually. Whilst on the subject of the app store, Amazon seem to offer some normally paid apps for free, and I was delighted to be able to download World of Goo on that basis.

One pleasant surprise is the keyboard, which is of the Swype variety, wherein you keep your finger against the glass sweeping through the letters of the word. This works brilliantly and is not only quicker,but also makes typing possible when typing on the move. It also seems to be very intelligent, you can safely skip repeated letters and it generally works out what you meant. I was very surprised that typing “go” in the previous paragraph correctly entered Goo, which suggests a knowledge of context - impressive in a keyboard. If you prefer a traditional touch keyboard then it can work like that as well.

One of the many free apps was BBC iPlayer and I was easily able to navigate to a program that I wanted to watch and it worked flawlessly, with smooth video offered in full screen.

Another huge positive is the speed of wireless acquisition, it has usually already found it by the time I unlock the screen. In contrast we have another Android tablet that takes forever to acquire our hidden SSID and my non-Fire Kindle has yet to acquire it without manually adding it afresh.

But the main reason for the tablet was my email and I was delighted that the stock email app was able to cope with both my work IMAP as well as my Gmail account.

I have not yet been able to test the battery life, for the simple reason that I have yet to charge it fully, not for lack of trying, but because it takes many hours to charge. This is an issue with USB charging. When buying my wife’s 10” tablet - a Zenithink ZTPAD ZT280 C91 - I was originally disappointed at the lack of USB charging, but now I see this as an advantage - as it will charge up fully in about an hour.

There’s no doubt that the Kindle Fire represents a compromise, but I have to say that this far I am very happy with the deal, the Fire is a very polished device for very little money and what it does it does extremely well. Would I have paid £129 though? I think I would have spent some more time looking at the Nexus before making that decision, but at £99 I am very pleased.

Update: I have managed to get Connectbot working thanks to this post.

Fantastic, Amazon have opened their MP3 download site for the UK. Better still they support Linux, offering clients for Debian, Ubuntu and Fedora. Once again we see companies choosing to support Linux from day one. Unfortunately there is no 64-bit version, as I found out last night. This really is the problem for companies producing proprietary software for an open platform. Which distros do they support? Which architectures? Which desktop environment?

The solution is obviously that they should just open source their client applications so that the distros can package them; or just publish their APIs and leave the open source community to develop the client apps. Naive I know, and yes I should just be grateful that Amazon are even offering a client for Linux. But then again the existence of the Amazon packaged client is going to be a powerful disincentive for any developer to produce an open source client. Maybe that wouldn’t be possible anyway.

I guess I can manage without the client app, but I’ll have to make sure that none of my friends and family move to 64-bit. That would have been the case anyway, as they all use Skype. So what am I actually complaining about? God knows. Oh yes, proprietary software; always worthy of a rant.