Just posting the Verge’s review for now, but feel free to throw others in.
Gotta say, it is dumb as hell that the speaker can’t be a speaker on its own. So if I’m listening to music, I can’t pick up the tablet and move over to the couch without severing the audio connection. That is bananas. I’m sure it’s a cost thing, given it’d need a chip of its own, but ffs.
I think the dock isn’t also a standalone speaker because of not just cost, but also logistics. I think it’s a lot more complicated to deal with what’s doing what when you need to deal with the tablet being docked or not because when it’s docked, they basically need to act like a single device (like a TV), but when it’s not they need to do their own thing independently.
I think if I wanted to use them independently, I’d just have a charging dock for the tablet, and a speaker. And then I wouldn’t have to try to figure out what it should do in each configuration.
But I also think I must not quite be the target market for this, because it hasn’t interested me much at all. I already have tablets, laptops, speakers, and even a Nest display in the kitchen that I got for free and basically don’t use except as a speaker. I can’t really see this improving my life.