The home Wi-Fi speaker is one of the most useful new pieces of mainstream hi-fi tech to come around in the last few years; allowing you to get high quality music from a variety of sources to devices of all shapes, sizes and levels of portability, using your phone, tablet, PC, voice or even buttons (how old school!).

And while speakers made by Google, Apple or Amazon can streamline things for those wedded to their respective ecoystems, it's also great to see more agnostic devices that support your choice of services. The only problem is that few of them truly support them all, so you really need to do your homework.

I've been using the $499 Bose Portable Home Speaker; a premium and beautiful Wi-Fi speaker with a handy cloth-covered handle that makes it easy to carry from place to place. As the speaker's name suggests this is not designed to be an on-the-go kind of device, rather it's a smart speaker that can move with you from room to room within your house, or even out to the patio or garden. (If you do take it out of range of your Wi-Fi you can tether it to your phone via Bluetooth, but you'll lose all the smarts.)

There's great clear 360-degree sound with ample bass as long as you don't need things extremely loud, and impressive automatic calibration that prevents things getting too noisy if you put it in a corner or underneath a chair. It also has very sensitive microphones for hearing your commands, and the best part is that brand agnosticism; both Amazon Alexa and Google Assistant are displayed equally on the packaging.