Sonos Move review: loud and full sound that is great indoors or out, reliable wireless connectivity, but too big and heavy for travel, significant setup bugs
Sonos' first portable speaker is more comfortable at home than on the go — For the past week or so, I've been listening to music …
Context & Ripple Effects
Two weeks after Sonos announced its first-ever portable speaker at $399, The Verge's verdict splits the pitch: the Move sounds full indoors and out and its WiFi-plus-Bluetooth design keeps connectivity dependable, but at this size and weight it is a home speaker that occasionally goes outside rather than a travel product — and significant setup bugs mar the out-of-box experience.
That software friction is not new for the company: the Sonos One review already flagged a complicated setup process back in 2017. What has changed is scope — the Move carries Alexa, Google Assistant, AirPlay 2, and Spotify Connect onto battery power, making Sonos' interoperability bet its main differentiator outside the living room.
First-order effects
- $399 buyers get a genuinely loud, full-sounding hybrid WiFi/Bluetooth speaker, but anyone shopping specifically for portability is told to look elsewhere — the Move's heft and buggy onboarding push it toward the patio, not the backpack.
- Sonos' voice-assistant and AirPlay integrations now work untethered from the home network, extending the ecosystem the company built through the One and Beam reviews into Bluetooth-only situations.
Second-order effects
- The obvious gap between 'portable' and 'travel-ready' sets up a smaller, cheaper sibling — which is exactly where Sonos went next, shipping the compact, rugged Roam roughly eighteen months later after its design leaked ahead of launch.
- Rivals in premium Bluetooth speakers suddenly face a competitor whose moat is ecosystem interoperability rather than driver size, pressuring them to add WiFi, AirPlay, or assistant support of their own.
Third-order effects
- Across four years of reviews — the One, the Beam, the Move, and eventually the Era 300 — the hardware earns praise while setup and app UX repeatedly draw criticism, a pattern that culminated in the company-wide app fiasco during CEO Tom Conrad's early tenure; as speaker hardware converges, software experience becomes Sonos' biggest liability.
- If the portable line matures the way the Roam suggests, Sonos transitions from a fixed multi-room audio company to one competing across every listening location — provided it fixes the software layer all those reviews flagged.
The trend: Premium multi-room audio makers are extending their ecosystems into portable, battery-powered speakers — and discovering that their software layer, not their acoustics, is what limits them.