Tmall Genie's High-End Strategy: WOW Wow Buddy and IN Sugar 6 Review

Tmall Genie's High-End Strategy: WOW Wow Buddy and IN Sugar 6 ReviewThe August weather in Beijing was exceptionally sunny, adding a touch of enthusiasm to Alibaba's Beijing Chaoyang Technology Park. Here, Tmall Genie held its high-end brand and new product launch conference, and Lei Technology was invited to cover the event

Tmall Genie's High-End Strategy: WOW Wow Buddy and IN Sugar 6 Review

The August weather in Beijing was exceptionally sunny, adding a touch of enthusiasm to Alibaba's Beijing Chaoyang Technology Park. Here, Tmall Genie held its high-end brand and new product launch conference, and Lei Technology was invited to cover the event.

At the conference, Tmall Genie introduced its new high-end brand WOW Wow for the first time, launching its first product, "Wow Buddy," along with the new product "IN Sugar 6" from the Tmall Genie IN Sugar series. Zhou Shen, the global spokesperson for both Tmall Genie and WOW Wow, was present at the event, showcasing the features of various new products.

WOW Wow Buddy: Intelligent Large Screen, Unlocking New Mobile Living Experiences

With the prevalence of smart homes, people's requirements for the usage scenarios and experiences of smart devices are becoming increasingly demanding. As a smart product that has emerged in recent years, the Buddy, due to its mobility and versatility, has gradually become an essential part of home entertainment and work.

Xiaodu is the pioneer of the Buddy, holding a significant market share. Tmall Genie's launch of WOW Wow Buddy aims to stand out in this mature category, offering users a superior audio-visual experience and more intelligent usage scenarios.

Elegant Design, Mobile Convenience

WOW Wow Buddy boasts an elegant and minimalist design. Its 27-inch rotatable and elevating screen not only meets users' needs for mobile entertainment, online classes, fitness, and work but also blends seamlessly with various home styles, becoming a focal point in living rooms, bedrooms, and studies.

4K True Tone Eye-Protection Screen, Upgraded Visual Experience

WOW Wow Buddy features a 27-inch 4K True Tone eye-protection screen with a 90% screen-to-body ratio, a 16:9 aspect ratio, and incorporates Genie's original painting technology. Through AI, it adjusts light and shadow effects and rendering precision, delivering a visual feast of high definition and realistic colors. Additionally, the screen prioritizes eye protection, with intelligent ambient light adjustment for brightness and color temperature, coupled with hardware low blue light technology, making eye-protection mode the norm. Even extended viewing won't cause fatigue.

Frequency Division Surround Sound System, Breathtaking Audio Quality

In terms of sound quality, WOW Wow Buddy fully emulates its predecessor, Tmall Genie X6, directly adopting the "tri-frequency surround sound system" frequently used in recording studios. The high frequencies feature 4 fully symmetrical tweeter units, the mid-frequencies have independent 20W mid-range units and sky sound fields, while the low frequencies employ a 4-inch 20W woofer and 2 4536mm passive radiators, combined with a ground resonance reflection design to deliver enhanced bass performance.

The official played a comparative video at the event showcasing WOW Wow Buddy alongside a competitor's Buddy and a certain home theater system. The video demonstrated that WOW Wow Buddy's sound clarity was excellent. While it couldn't match large-scale HiFi devices, it could truly be considered a leader in its price range.

Intelligent Operating System GenieOS 7.0, Enhanced Smart Experience

Besides outstanding sound and image quality, WOW Wow Buddy also comes equipped with the intelligent operating system GenieOS 7.0. It supports multi-modal control, including voice, touch, and remote, allowing users to operate the device more conveniently. Furthermore, WOW Wow Buddy offers features like immersive sound and image, movie and TV show viewing + music package, providing users with a richer entertainment experience.

Smart Home Integration, Unlocking Unlimited Possibilities

Perhaps most attractively, WOW Wow Buddy can be connected to the Tmall Genie AIoT smart home system, enabling home scene integration. For example, users can control lighting, appliances, and other devices through voice commands, creating a smart home life.

Affordable Price, Outstanding Value

WOW Wow Buddy offers two standard versions: 8GB+128GB and 8GB+256GB, with initial prices of 4999 yuan and 5499 yuan respectively. The Zhou Shen customized version, 8GB+256GB, is priced at 5699 yuan, but the initial price is 5499 yuan.

IN Sugar 6: Small Size, Large Sound Cavity, Combining Entertainment and Practicality

Tmall Genie IN Sugar 6 is a smart speaker that emphasizes a small size and large sound cavity. Its appearance adopts the design language of the IN Sugar series' square outline, featuring a metal woven mesh with electrophoretic coating technology. It also introduces a new five-axis laser texture technology for the first time, giving the speaker surface a 3D litchi skin texture effect, significantly enhancing the overall(quality).

The left side of the front panel features a circular Thousand Island interactive screen that users can customize with wallpapers. Additionally, IN Sugar 6 incorporates a temperature and humidity sensor, providing real-time indoor temperature and humidity information.

Powerful Sound Quality, Immersive Experience

IN Sugar 6 boasts a 550cc large sound cavity, coupled with a 8045 large-diameter racing type speaker and a peak power of 33W, enabling a small size to deliver a truly immersive sound experience. Moreover, Tmall Genie has created a U-shaped bass port design, achieving a 3dB bass enhancement, and equipped it with a loudness level tracking algorithm that can compensate for high and low frequencies based on the equal loudness contour.

Multi-Functional and Practical, Easier Life

Aside from excellent audio quality, IN Sugar 6 also supports Tmall Genie's signature smart home control functions, along with Sound Museum 2.0, voice recognition, white noise, Genie countdown, schedule management, and other features, offering users a more convenient and intelligent life experience.

Various Color Options, Personalized Choices

IN Sugar 6 comes in three color options: Black Sugar, Milk Sugar, and Orange Sugar, along with a "Zhou Shen Gift Box version" to satisfy the personalized preferences of different users for the speaker's appearance.

Affordable Price, Excellent Value

The initial price of IN Sugar 6 is 179 yuan, while the Zhou Shen Gift Box version is priced at 249 yuan, both very affordable.

Smart Home, Future Trend

Even before the conference, Lei Technology was very interested in the hardware specifications of WOW Wow Buddy. In the end, it didn't disappoint us, achieving a(ten-thousand yuan) level of specification with a product priced in the thousands. As we listened further, we discovered the brand design's ingenuity hidden behind the hardware, such as the Thousand Island interactive screen on Tmall IN Sugar 6 and the multi-scene applications of WOW Wow Buddy. Simply relying on hardware configuration cannot achieve its inherent appeal. What genuinely attracts users is the sense of companionship and interaction brought by functionality.

Therefore, Lei Technology believes that although smart speakers and Buddies come in various forms, their essence is essentially a personal/family intelligent assistant, not just a pure hardware product. On one hand, they are individual products that make up a smart home, while on the other hand, they act as the entry point for the smart home, a bridge for two-way interaction between users and intelligent houses.

In this era of the intelligent technology wave sweeping across, smart living has already become part of our daily routine. Relying on a single product alone to fight a lone battle is unlikely to create a sustainable competitive advantage. The key for all manufacturers going forward is to leverage cutting-edge technologies like AI to integrate multiple individual products into a unified "suite," simultaneously providing users with more smart home life scenario services through integrated software and hardware design, making homes more intelligent and comfortable.

Fortunately, brands like Tmall Genie have recognized this trend and are developing products with a smart home core based on this understanding. Looking further ahead, when all home products become a unified whole, they will create more possibilities in scenarios like the kitchen and bathroom.

In the broader context of AI reshaping the entire industry, a new era of smart homes is about to arrive. Tmall Genie, among others, is actively seeking its position in this new AIoT era.

Technology Circle, A Gathering Storm

The first half of 2024 saw a gathering storm in the tech circle. Large language models(accelerated landing), AI phones, AI PCs, AI appliances, AI search, AI e-commerce... AI applications emerged one after another; Vision Pro went on sale and landed in the Chinese market, reigniting the wave of XR spatial computing; HarmonyOS NEXT was officially released, changing the mobile OS ecosystem; cars fully entered the "second half," with intelligence becoming the top priority; e-commerce competition intensified, with a focus on low prices and services; the wave of going global intensified, with Chinese brands embarking on a journey of globalization.

In the scorching heat of July, Lei Technology's mid-year review series went online, summarizing the brands, technologies, and products worthy of note in the technology industry in the first half of 2024, recording the past and looking forward to the future. Please stay tuned.

Conclusion

Tmall Genie's launch of WOW Wow Buddy and IN Sugar 6 is not only a reflection of its high-end strategy but also a significant step in its exploration of smart homes. It is believed that in the future, T