Vizio's new SmartCast Crave 360 and Pro speakers look badass, support Google Cast and Bluetooth

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Vizio's new SmartCast Crave 360 and Pro speakers look badass, support Google Cast and Bluetooth

Vizio has been teasing its new Google Cast speakers for several months and they're now finally, officially official. The new SmartCast Crave series has two speakers and they both look positively badass with a satin aluminum grille, but I have to say I'm mostly smitten by the 360.

The Crave 360 has a tubular shape reminiscent of the Amazon Echo, and uses it to blast tunes in 360 degrees. It's meant to be a portable and stationary speaker in one, with an 8h battery life and a wireless charging base that you can pluck it on and take it off whenever you feel like bringing it to the garden, park, balcony, or just moving it around the house. There's even a leather strap to carry it safely.

The Crave Pro is a bigger stationary speaker with more power, 2 subwoofers, and better low frequency response at 40Hz. It needs to be plugged in at all times, so there's no carrying this thing around the house.

Both speakers have Bluetooth 4.1 as well as WiFi for Google Cast support and multi-room pairing compatibility. There's an Ethernet port on the back too, if you want a more reliable connection than a wireless one. However, unlike the JBL Playlist announced a few days ago, there's no 3.5mm input if you want to send audio from a more analogue source.

The Crave 360 and Pro don't have buttons for controls, but a rotating touch dial that you can tap to play/pause, swipe to skip back and forth, and twist to adjust the volume.

You can use Vizio's own SmartCast app to queue and send tunes to the Crave speakers, do voice searches for music, and more. But you can also send audio from any Cast-compatible app on your phone.

The Crave 360 is already available for $249.99, whereas the Crave Pro is marked as "Coming Soon" for $299.99.

VIZIO Mobile Developer: VIZIO
Price: Free
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Source: Vizio SmartCast Crave 360, Crave Pro

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