Apple announced this morning that the wait for its HomePod smart speaker is nearly over. HomePod will be available starting February 9, with preorders beginning Friday, January 26. The home speaker that houses the company's virtual assistant Siri will initially be sold in the US, UK, and Australia, and will be available in France and Germany this spring.

The company first announced HomePod at last year's WWDC with the hopes of releasing it in December for $349, ahead of the holiday season. However, that deadline came and went and those who wanted an Apple version of Amazon's Echo and Google's Home were left waiting.

Apple's announcement doesn't detail anything we didn't already know about HomePod. The cylindrical speaker is powered by Apple's A8 chip and uses an array of six microphones to pick up your calls of "Hey, Siri" from across the room, even with music playing. It also uses real-time acoustic modeling, audio beam-forming, and echo cancellation to create a rich sound experience, and its spacial awareness feature lets it automatically adjust to produce the best sound for its location in your home.

Much like Amazon's Alexa and Google's Assistant, Siri in the HomePod can answer questions, read off forecast information and the news, and control HomeKit-compatible smart home devices. Apple notes that HomePod is "designed to work with an Apple Music subscription," meaning you likely won't be able to call upon Siri to play music from Spotify or other third-party services (at least, not yet).

It appears Siri will have special third-party integrations on HomePod as well. Apple states in its announcement that SiriKit for HomePod will allow users to ask Siri to send a message through different third-party apps like WhatsApp, not just Apple's native iMessage, and add things to lists in apps including Evernote, rather than Apple's default Reminders or Notes apps.

Since Apple revealed HomePod, it's been clear that the company is focusing more on sound quality and the music-listening experience with this smart speaker than Siri's capabilities as a home assistant. That's why Apple's device is so much more expensive than most Amazon Echo devices and the Google Home and Home Mini speakers (although Google does have Home Max, its own high-end smart speaker). However, HomePod will not launch with an important music feature: multi-room audio and stereo. Apple states that this will come to HomePod later this year through a free software update, allowing two or more HomePods to play the same audio throughout an entire home or specific room.