Review on Creative Stage Air: Portable & Compact USB-Powered Soundbar with Big Bass, Bluetooth, AUX-in & 6-Hour Battery Life by Ben Swett

I bought this to add some extra sound to my bedroom Echo Dot which I use for music and sometimes as an alarm clock. When I received it I found to my dismay that it has a built in timer that will automatically turn off the speaker after 6 hours regardless of whether it is plugged into a power source or not. Why? The creative literature states that this is necessary to prevent users from over-discharging the batteries. But as I said, it turns itself off after 6 hours whether the device is connected to the network or not. Apparently the firmware disabled the speaker sometime after 10 minutes, so they acknowledged that was a problem and released an update to try and fix it, but it still keeps the behavior, just after a lot longer time. So don't take this if you plan to connect it to the Echo Dot unless you want to press a button to turn on the speaker before using it. It doesn't have a remote control, so it has restrictions on where it can be placed. I find it quite odd that companies keep putting batteries in speakers. This is meant to be an attempt to bring them to a wider audience, but in this case they have actually made a perfectly decent little soundbar significantly worse and generally unsuitable for my purposes. Who wants to take a relatively large soundbar with them? It's not weatherproof, it's shiny and it picks up fingerprints like crazy, it's not even durable. Who is it supposed to please? Apparently not me.