BillG wrote: 
So you're saying you're not yet sure about how good it is ? 

OK. 

Total time to set up Echo:  5 easy minutes.
To set up Home: 1 long, frustrating hour.

Plus, it won't even play RP via TuneIn (which Echo does right out of the box). "Play Radio Paradise on TuneIn" (which works on Echo) gives me some crappy Italian station on Home.

And it sounds awful. Echo is not a HiFi device, but the audio quality is surprisingly listenable. Home sounds like a $10 bluetooth speaker from a truck stop. 

Fail.

We're developing an app for Google Home (hopefully, anyway — you have to ask them really, really nicely and then wait weeks for them to tell you if they'll allow your proposed app), so I bought one.

Amazingly enough, Google won't let me even activate the unit while I'm signed in to my G-Suite user account (my radioparadise.com address, which is managed by Google G-Suite, aka Google Apps). I don't know how many millions of people use those accounts — worldwide probably something roughly equal to the population of the US.

Is that crazy or what? I'm in the subset of Gmail users who actually pays for the service, and they block me from using their heavily-promoted new gizmo. That would be like trying to set up an Echo and being told "Sorry, this device won't work because you're subscribed to Amazon Prime".

Sheesh. Sometimes Google can be so amazingly clueless. 

For the unit to work, I have to sign out of my account on my phone & sign in using a personal Gmail address. I will NOT do that, so I'm going to fire up an old phone & set it up on my personal account, which I don't even remember the password for. Thanks, Google.