I suppose one advantage is that if you walk far away from your stereo, you can loose bluetooth connection and drop audio, where this device has it's own WiFi connection and pulls Spotify audio directly, and is just manually controlled via your phone.
Worth noting streaming Spotify over Chromecast (like on a chromecast audio) is oddly enough limited to 256 kbps AAC. The TV chromecast devices support Spotify Connect, I guess because they boot the full app GUI.
- Your phone has to be connected the entire time
- Quality is flaky
- It has to stay in range
- You have to manually disconnect/reconnect it every time
- You can't take calls while playing music
- Only one person/phone can connect to the speaker at a time
- It drains battery
Having the speaker stream directly from the internet while having your phone (or multiple phones, or web browser, or voice etc.) acting as a remote is a game changer.
Fully agree with your other points. And they're enough on their own.
You could be hosting a party, for example, and want to leave the room to take a call without interrupting the music.
In practice, this is just a terrible speaker that can only ever play Spotify. It's a waste of energy and resources that you will throw away within a year.
It's fun, and it's an amazing learning exercise.
* Bluetooth offers limited range and uses more battery, and is usually interrupted if someone calls, but supports any application that can play sound.
* Spotify Connect is its own Spotify client and downloads the audio stream from Spotify which allows freedom to roam. But the implementation is indeed limited to Spotify and doesn't support niceties like volume normalization or nerdy details like crossfade (and perhaps not gapless playback)