Anker PowerConf S500 Conference Speaker with Zoom Certification, USB-C Bluetooth for Calls, Conferences, Phones, Microphones for Smart Voice Recording, Black

After seeing a few reviews which said this didn't work with Linux, I did some research before purchasing. It would seem that ALSA/Pulseaudio doesn't support Bluetooth audio very well, but the solution is to switch to Pipewire. With this knowledge in mind, I took the plunge and bought this microphone/speaker.As expected, this device doesn't work with ALSA/Pulseaudio, so I found a walkthrough to install and switch to Pipewire on Ubuntu 20.04, and it works!I have tested the device as both microphone and speaker and it performs really well!It is loud enough to be easily audible in a conference of 12 people, and it picks up audio from anywhere within the conference room. (About 3 metres radius).Very happy!

I never had nor touched a better conference speaker. Great build quality, feels expensive to the touch. Definitely luxurious and takes the stage. Extremely loud, numerous connectivity options. Handled with ease by older users as well. Big visible touch and physical buttons for main functions.

Very simple to set up and makes zoom calls so much better as the sound quality is excellent.

This is a very good products I find it very useful to use, luckily it was a black Friday sale, otherwise I would not be able to buy the product. The sound quality is excellent, I use this many times to connect it to my mobile phone for hands free. As it has four mics for good one to one communication. I would recommend this product to anyone as a good product thats if you can pay the price if this item.

Very handy.

I bought this because I wanted good sound for both calls and music. This speaker is sold on these features but it doesn't deliver elsewhere.I connected my phone by bluetooth and the computer by USB. This unit was not happy about this. One device would steal the connection from the other for no reason.Each day, and sometimes each call, the volume would reset to max and need adjusting immediately.The music quality was good but not amazing and definitely not on par with a dedicated speaker of similar size. I gues this is due to all the extra electronics in the device taking up the sound box, so maybe forgivable, or at least it would have been if this wasn't the devices USP.The touch controls were hard to use, or more correctly, hard not to use by accident.Even when I wasn't using bluetooth, the sound would drop mid call on Zoom and teams and the only way to resume it was to turn on bluetooth and connect to something else and then back again (or wait about a minute and it would sometimes revert).The device is quite big for a portable speaker phone and it is quite heavy which makes it feel solid and good quality. If this is your only mic and speaker and is only connected to one device then it might be ok but for me it was too difficult to use and the app is totally unhelpful.The worst feature though was the noise cancellation, because mostly, it doesn't cancel noise, and when it does it also cancels the speach so people cannot hear you.I do not recommend this product.

Well packaged, solid feel. Performed very well.

Purchased two of these, to setup in paired setup to cater for a larger meeting room (20 people) with numerous others joining via Teams. initially started out well, with the two S500 devices paired and one connected to the laptop via USB. After the first hour we noticed the sound (remote people) was only coming out of the paired device, no sound from the USB device, but the blue light implied the microphone was picking up the voices in the room with the devices.Shortly after the remote people started in complain the sound from the room with the devices was not clear and then it started echoing terrible, both remotely and in the room. At this point we had to shut the devices off as despite powering on and off, rebooting the laptop with teams on, just continued to get a terrible echo.At this point, we shut them off and got the old Jabra device back out, not great be at least it allowed the meeting to continue.Will be return both devices as not fit for purpose/defective. Really disappointed in these devices as always rated Anker equiments, but these are really poor, and has tainted my opinion of the Anker device, and the other 20 people in the room.I would seriously question the validity of the 5-star reviews, this is not a 5-star product and probably the 1-star reviews are likely to be the real reviews and a fairer reflect on the product.