Digital Home Thoughts: Logitech's Z-10 Speakers: Your Laptop's Best Friend

What's in the box?
The Z-10s come in packaging nicer than most speakers, so the out of box experience is impressive. The box is quite heavy, which gives you a feeling of quality. Each speaker has a plastic cover on it to protech the glossy front from scratches. The speaker without the controls is deceptively heavy - I believe because the power converter is inside it. There's no big power brick with these speakers, just a single power cable. The package also includes a USB cable to connect to the PC, and a single male to male 3.5mm audio cable for connecting to analog audio sources.


Figure 1: The front of the right-channel Z-10 speaker.

There are a few differentiating features with these speakers: first, and most obvious are the controls. There's a 160 x 43 pixel LCD panel that can be used for several things: displaying the name of the playing song, a clock when there was no song playing, the date, or even email alerts. There are four preset buttons above the main controls, and these can be mapped to Internet radio stations or playlists. The playlist functionality in particular sounds helpful, especially if you map them to different genres. Launching into a game to frag someone? Punch #1 for your hard rock playlist. Mellowing out and writing some email? Punch #2 for your jazz/ambiant playlist. That's a lot faster than fumbling with your software to find a certain playlist.

Unfortunately I wasn't able to test any of those functions because at the time of this writing (Feb 1st, 2006), there was no Vista version of the desktop client software for me to install on my laptop. The Windows XP software might have worked, but I didn't want to risk installing anything that would de-stabalize my laptop. For a complete breakdown of what software does, take a look at this Digital Trends review. It's worth noting that even without the desktop software installed, the play/pause, previous/next, and volume controls all still work.