Harman is a US-based company that manufactures audio equipment for home, theater, automotive, and other applications. Now, we’ve seen this company released quite a few products over the last couple of years, and CES has always been the company’s biggest tradeshow. Harman had plenty to say this year as well, and amongst all of their announcements, they’ve also shared some China-only info with the public, read on.
This US-based company has decided to partner with JingDong Mall, also known as JD.com, one of China’s largest retailers. This announcement was shared during CES in Las Vegas, where VP and GM of Harman Lifestyle Audio Divison and CEO of JD.com shared the info with us. Now, as part of this partnership, Harman will start selling JBL Go Smart speaker through JD.com, a speaker which was just announced at CES 2016. The two companies will also worth together in order to create smart home products in which they’ll incorporate smart audio systems, like voice recognition, for example.
”Over the years, HARMAN has been dedicated to the R&D and manufacturing of advanced audio products and the perfection of sound systems, and we are striving to promote our products and technologies to a broader market while consistently expanding our hardware services. HARMAN hopes to combine JD.com’s advantages in smart hardware with our powerful audio technologies, allowing us to offer our innovative smart hardware technologies and perfect sound quality to more consumers. This new product marks the start of our mutual cooperation, and the parties will launch more high-tech products in the future,” said David Jin, president and chairman of Harman Northeast Asia and Greater China.
Now, the JBL Go Smart speaker will support both Wi-Fi and Bluetooth streaming, which should give you plenty of options as far as on-the-go streaming goes. When it is connected via Wi-Fi, this speaker can connect to a number of cloud-based resources which include voice search and recognition functions. You can select a song using voice instructions in the system’s cloud-based music library, while you can also ask the speaker for weather and latest news. Harman says that this speaker’s built-in battery, which is rechargeable, will allow the user up to 5 hours of playtime. The device will be available on JD.com in the second quarter of this year, and will cost 399 Yuan ($61). The speaker will be available in Blue and Red color options though JD.com, in case you were wondering.