If you’re looking to bring some smarts into your home, we’ve got two great candidates right here. We’re going to be comparing these two speakers side by side to see how they each perform. With that said, let’s get started. However, it keeps its four physical buttons on top for volume up, volume down, microphone mute, and the action button to activate Alexa without having to say the wake word. On the back, you’re going to find a power port with a 3.5 millimeter auxiliary jack to connect this to an external speaker or to a better sound system. Another new change with the Echo Dot 4 is that the action light has been moved from the top of the device, to the bottom of the device. So depending on its location, that might be a good or bad thing, but I’ll talk about that in a minute. So the Google Next Mini looks a bit dated now. But I guess that’s to be expected, because this device did come out in 2019. It has a much cleaner look with no visible buttons. Instead, it has touch sensors under the fabric. This is for volume up, volume down, and you can tap on the middle to play and pause music. You can also mute the mic with a physical button on the back. Also, there is a hole on the bottom of the device so you can hang this on a wall if you wanted to. Now, unlike the Echo Dot, this device does not have a 3.5 millimeter jack. But you can connect both devices to external speakers through Bluetooth. Now, I want to circle back to the action lights on both of these devices. Now when I initially saw that they moved the light to the bottom of the Echo Dot, I was concerned that you weren’t really going to be able to see that light at all. But, in fact, it was quite the opposite. The light now reflects off the surface, making it actually even brighter and easier to see than it was before. Now, the Next Mini, on the other hand, actually has the lights underneath the fabric. So, from a distance, if you were trying to talk to this speaker, it’s going to be hard to see if those lights are on, and it’s actually listening to you. If you have multiple Nest Minis, you can request to have a song that’s playing on one sent to another room. So for example, I can say, Hey Google, move music to the kitchen. Now, unfortunately, as of right now, you can’t do that with your Echo device. Because of the speaker configurations inside the Echo Dot, it sounds better than the Nest Mini. And as far as music, they’re both pretty comparable to each other. Now, looking at a smart home, essentially pick your assistant. Do you want the Google Assistant, or Alexa? But as far as the device hardware, the Echo Dot did get an upgrade this year, where the Nest Mini is still running on 2019 hardware. So with all of that said, I’m going to go ahead and pick the Echo Dot 4 as the winner of this head to head competition.
