Sonos to Expand Controller Opportunities Via Mobile Apps

The Sonos system is the first multi-room product that allows users to play a track from a phone in every room in the house, said Jon Reilly, Sonos technical product manager at a media briefing in New York Monday. “No one who does AirPlay right now supports party mode,” Reilly said, citing restrictions put in place by Apple for how users interact with the phone. Sonos’ solution was to build a software layer for the line-in section of its amplifier that enables users to plug in an AirPort Express wireless networking device “and turn Sonos into an AirPort client that can play a song streamed off your phone anywhere in the house.” To prevent latency issues that can occur in single-source multi-room systems, Sonos built tight synchronization into its system using its mesh network and software, Reilly said. The Sonos AirPlay feature works with any Apple mobile device, he said.

As Sonos competes with traditional hi-fi companies such as Denon and Yamaha, “the quality assurance side” will be the differentiator, Sonos co-founder Tom Cullen told us. “Rather than writing the software themselves, most traditional hi-fi engineers have bought AirPlay software in chips from other companies.” Sonos has a quality-assurance staffer for every developer “who’s right behind them testing the software,” he said. The time element comes in by “making sure it works like everyone expects it to,” he said.

Cullen said the chips being incorporated by hi-fi companies are based on a previous generation of wireless. “When you read reviews you'll see that they'll mention that the music stops,” he said. “Wireless is all about range and throughput and each generation improves on those.” While the wireless networking market is moving to 802.11n, AirPlay chips are still operating over “B” and “G” networks, he said. Apple’s own chip, in the AirPort Express, runs on 802.11n, he said, and will deliver a smoother streaming experience as a result. Another issue facing hi-fi engineers is knowledge about antennas, he said. “Sonos has been wireless from the first day,” he said. “It’s so much easier to hire an acoustic engineer than a wireless engineer today,” he said. “It doesn’t matter who it is. They're going to have to learn a whole new set of skills around systems integration.”

Sonos introduced an iPhone app in 2008 and also has an app for the iPad. Sonos mobile apps allow users “to do anything they could do from a Sonos controller from a phone,” Reilly said. “We're all about bringing as much functionality that we can to devices that people already own in their homes.” Android compatibility opens “100 million new customers” to Sonos who own Android-based phones from suppliers including Samsung, HTC and Sony Ericsson, he said.

Android phones can do a few things with the Sonos app that the iPhone can’t do, Reilly said. Hard volume buttons were easier to add, for one, because “there are some lockdowns around the programming sandbox they put you in,” he said. Android exposes the hardware “a lot more than the iPhone does,” said Sonos spokesman Thomas Meyer. Android users can also do voice searches for a track or artist, which offers a faster alternative to searching by typing in a name, Reilly said.

Android apps are platform-based, not model-based, so feature execution may vary from phone to phone. The rate at which Android-based phones are launched precludes Sonos from introducing an app tailored for a particular phone, Reilly said. “But phones tend to have standard screen sizes and Google has done a good job of making the general interface the same across the devices,” he said. “We had to make sure that the interface looked good and scaled properly across the different devices."

An app for Android tablets is in the works, Cullen told us. Efficiencies of design following introduction of the Android mobile app could bring it to market in six months versus the nine month gestation period for the Android mobile platform, Cullen said.

The Sonos iPad app is “the best controller for the Sonos system,” Reilly said -- even better than the company’s own controller -- “because there’s so much screen real estate” to interact with. Users can view music sources in one panel, which zones are playing in another and which track is up next in another -- all on a single screen. Screen size on a mobile phone is much more limited, he said.

Despite the popularity of the iPad app, Reilly said Sonos has no plans to discontinue its $349 CR200 controller that was “designed from the ground up by Sonos.” The company doesn’t disclose sales numbers, Reilly said, but it had expected strong cannibalization of controller sales with the introduction of mobile phone and tablet apps. “Some of that has happened but not to the extent you might expect,” he said. He said users who bought the first Sonos Zone Player in 2005 “have all the functionality as though they bought it today,” thanks to free software updates that are pushed to systems via the Internet.