Google Home and Google Wifi – £129 each

[Boris]

Coming in April. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-39417474

Any thoughts as to whether they will be worth it ?

Home https://madeby.google.com/home/

Wifi https://madeby.google.com/intl/en_uk/wifi/

Never trust an atom - they make up everything !

[Dave Rice]

That’s a lot of money for what is basically a mesh WiFi station. I suspect most people will fall into the same trap they do with extenders and put them in the wrong place.

Most houses don’t need more devices, just 1 proper device in the correct location.

[The Duke]

Wifi is ment to be  good, it’s expensive and limited and super easy to administer. But I don’t think even I’m fully comfy with the google router. A but too noisy for my liking.

Google home, like the Amazon echo has so much potential, I do think I’ll be getting one of them. But will be waiting for a sub £100 deal.

[PlaneMan]

With Google Assistant coming to the Shield K1 and the voice control via the joypad I have no need for either device.

Mum is getting the new Fire Stick with Alexa voice control built in so I’ll see how that goes for her and maybe look at one of the Dot if she feels the need for more options.

There are a few dead spots in mum’s place where wifi just won’t work so when funds allow I’ll be getting one of the access points Dave recommends often to see if that does the job.

[The Duke]

If I didn’t have the pixel, that has an assistant, I’d be much eager to get a home device, but give I’m mainly interested for geeky testing purposes, i can can do all that stuff via the phone.

[Dave Rice]

OK, a couple of potential problems. The primary WiFi unit is a wireless router, not a straight access point. This is going to cause issues with Port Forwarding and accessing anything on the ISP routers network, like a server or printer.

It can be turned into one, for some reason they call it “Bridge Mode” but only if you don’t want a mesh. You also lose most of the features like Priority Device and Guest WiFi as well as only having a single AP. Seems to take away the reason for having it in the first place.

It also intimates that most ISP routers have a Bridge Mode (yeah right) and this is what you’re recommended to do. FFS.

It also doesn’t support WPS so you must have a way of entering a password into anything that will connect to Google WiFi, which could be a real issue for a lot of cheaper IoT type devices. I find it hard to blame them for that though as WPS can be a security risk.

EDIT – Nolan, I’ll pop over any time with the test kit.

[PlaneMan]

Thanks Dave, you may well get a message nearer the time, won’t be for a while though.

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