With Alexa built-in plus four far-field microphones, so it can hear you clearly, you can use your voice to turn smart lights on and off, adjust smart thermostats and control other smart home devices. You can also ask for weather and travel information, ask Alexa to play music and ask it to look up information. Even with just one or two network bars showing, however, you’ll be able to get pretty decent Alexa performance from the AI Cube. In our kitchen the connection strength fell into the lower ‘orange’ range on the HiLink app’s Best Position tool, yet Alexa still proved reasonably responsive, while streaming BBC 6 Radio came with only the occasional drop out. Huawei is no stranger to disrupting established markets. It has rapidly ascended the ladder to become one of the world’s biggest smartphone manufacturers, partly through pioneering combinations of components. It was ahead of the game on both triple-lens cameras and reverse wireless charging, for example.

The SIM card slot is also at the bottom with the Reset hole. The Huawei B900 WiFi cube uses Micro SIM card size. Below the IMEI & S/N number label, there is an Ethernet port for LAN and WAN. The power plug port is at the side of the Ethernet port.

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It’s a great addition to any home where Wi-Fi connectivity proves problematic and 4G performance is strong. It could also become a useful travel companion if your premises don’t always tend to have reliable Wi-Fi. As you have found with your iPad, you're getting the same speeds with a CAT4 device (a CAT4 cannot aggregate any bands) as you are with your B900, suggesting that both are connected to a single 4G band (probably B3). The Huawei AI Cube pulls off the feat of being unique in an increasingly crowded smart speaker market. While it’s a fully functioning Alexa smart speaker and a viable Bluetooth speaker, the main function here is its 4G router capability. photos maximum, each photo's size should be less than 10MB (bmp, jpg, png, gif, and jpeg are supported) The R219 isn't really suitable for home working setup that out of preference uses wired connections to get best quality connections for web conferencing and the like - especially if you need to lead some sessions. In my area I find it drops out often, and data throughput is inconsistent. Also, if you have a smarthome setup, a max of 10 connections on a hotspot really won't do, and I've tried lots of configurations to try to keep that going. I was looking for affordable ways to tide me over until fibre restored, and on the face of it, similar technology from Huawei looked favourable, with an Ethernet connection.

A 400ml sound cavity paired with an aluminium diaphragm and passive radiators combine to deliver what Huawei calls '"big sound". Adopting its proprietary Histen sound tuning technology seen in Huawei and Honor smartphones, the claim is that the AI Cube sound is 360-degree and immersive.In the flesh, it is loud, making plenty of noise in a busy room. While loud is good, there was depth and roundness to the sound too, though without testing the audio quality alongside its key competitors or in a controlled environment. Another useful piece of software is the "Best Position" feature, which enables you to find the position with the best signal strength. As a speaker, the Huawei AI Cube offers reasonably expansive performance, though the output isn’t strictly 360-degrees as claimed. The sound is clearest and fullest from the front.

And it’s not limited just to 4G, as using the ethernet port you can also use the Huawei AI Cube as a Wi-Fi router, with support for 802.11ac, capable of broadcasting on both the 2.4GHz and 5GHz bands and with speeds theoretically up to 1,200Mbps over LAN. Features Tools gives you a number of mini applications, such as the aforementioned Best Position signal-chasing feature. You’ll also find an SMS app tied to the SIM card used within the AI Cube, and a Guest Wi-Fi feature that lets you set up a strictly limited sub-network for guests. This allows for high quality audio, including strong but not overwhelming bass. Huawei’s Histen tech is also used, adding virtual bass, adaptive gain control, a linear phase equalizer and more. This isn’t going to compete with a high-end speaker, but the sound is better than you might expect for a device of this size. The AI Cube has an ethernet port and power supply on the bottom, and volume keys and a button to mute the microphone on the top – of course, when not muted the device will mostly be controlled by voice, more on which below. Setup It’s worth noting also that the price still makes it far cheaper than many typical home broadband plans, especially as they often require a landline, which this doesn’t. ConclusionThe app is split between three main sections: Device, Tools and Smart speaker. Device is the default screen you’ll face each time you boot up the app, and it shows you how much of your data plan you’ve used and which devices are connected. B32 is a supplementary downlink (SDL) band and must always be aggregated with another band that can provide uplink connectivity - from what I've seen usually this is achieved on router devices by using B20, as with your B900. Figuring out how to establish a Bluetooth link isn’t immediately apparent, though. It’s strange that you can’t hook up your smartphone in this way (for direct music streaming) from the HiLink app, but rather have to ask Alexa to do so. But at least the function is there, contrary to reports you might have read elsewhere. Features