Google Home Mini Briefly Appeared On Walmart Store, Release Date Leaks

Google will be announcing its new pair of Pixel 2 smartphones Wednesday alongside other new products. One of them is the smaller Google Home Mini, which popped up prematurely on Walmart’s website Tuesday morning. The listing also revealed the Google Home Mini release date.

Walmart listed that the Google Home Mini will arrive on Oct. 19, which is just two weeks after Google’s official unveiling tomorrow. As IBT previously reported earlier this month, the smaller smart speaker will cost $49.

The Walmart pre-order listing for the Google Home Mini was first spotted by Droid Life. Unfortunately, the webpage has already been taken down and it seems like someone from Walmart jumped the gun by making the product listing available. Although the listing has been taken down, some interesting information on the Home Mini has already been revealed.

9To5Google was also able to dig deeper into the Walmart’s Google Home Mini product page before it was taken down and discovered a couple more of photos of the smart speaker. In one of the photos, it looks like the device will have a power port of some kind. The photo doesn’t really show what type of port it will be, but it’s being speculated to be a microUSB port rather than USB Type-C.

There’s also one photo showing the Pixel 2 XL alongside the new Google Home Mini. The photo clearly shows that the recent leaks for the upcoming smartphone are indeed accurate.

The Walmart listing for the Google Home Mini didn’t include the device’s full spec sheet, but it did reveal that it will weigh less than a pound and measures at 4.53 x 4.53 x 4.72 inches. The listing also described the upcoming Home Mini smart speakers as the user’s “powerful little helper.”

This isn’t actually the only slip up surrounding the new Google Home Mini. Earlier today, Twitter user Raymond Durk, who lives a couple of blocks away from the Google campus, spotted the new Home Mini smart speaker on his Google Home app. The speaker hasn’t been set up yet, which is why it also popped up on his Google Home app. Android Police speculates that a nearby Google employee was possibly trying out the new Home Mini speaker.

The Home Mini is expected to function very much like the original Google Home speaker with Google Assistant built right in. The only difference between the two will be their respective sizes and prices. The original Google Home arrived with a $130 price tag.

With the Google Home Mini, it seems like Google is trying to take on Amazon’s Echo Dot smart speaker, which also costs $49. Amazon is currently leading the smart home speaker race with the help of its own digital assistant Alexa and the expansion of its Echo product lineup.

Google only has the original Home and the new Home Mini, but it looks like the company is planning future expansions as well. The company is currently rumored to be working on two other Home smart speakers: the Google Home “Max” and another device that’s been described as an Amazon Echo Show competitor.