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Hands-on: The Mini Back Pack mounts the Google Home Mini to your outlet for $15

The Google Home Mini is a fantastic piece of hardware. It’s small, has a decent enough speaker for talking to Google Assistant or listening to music, and it’s inexpensive. The Home Mini’s biggest issue is just the fact that you must have it laying on a surface with a long cable trailing behind it.

While Google and Incipio have partnered together to create a wall mount for the Mini, it just isn’t ideal for those who don’t want to or can’t put holes in their walls. Thankfully, a third-party company has created the perfect solution, mounting the Home Mini to your electrical outlet.

The Mini Back Pack comes in a kit, including the wall plug, a short microUSB cable, and the mount itself. Connecting the Home Mini to the mount is pretty straightforward. There are three arms that each have small teeth that fit in between the Mini’s plastic casing and the fabric top.

My biggest complaint with the whole set up process was the short microUSB cable that comes with the kit. While I appreciated the minimal length, so it doesn’t show when the Home Mini is mounted, its size made it hard to plug in. You have to align each end perfectly and then push down at the same time, or else it is impossible to plug the microUSB connector in.

Additionally, as you can see from the below photos, the cord is so taunt that I worry about it malfunctioning or even breaking.

Once you get everything connected and plugged into a wall outlet, the Mini Back Pack transforms the Home Mini into the perfect wall speaker, something Nvidia wanted to do with the Spot. The compact design and electrical prong placement means the entire package only takes up one outlet and is almost entirely hidden behind the Home Mini.

While this might not be the ideal mounting situation for you, I did find this to be extremely useful in the kitchen and even the bathroom where counter space is limited.

If you’re interested in purchasing the Mini Back Pack, it’s currently for sale on Amazon for $15 in both white and black. Unfortunately, there isn’t a color-matched version of those with the coral model.


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Avatar for Justin Duino Justin Duino

I’m a writer for 9to5Google with a background in IT and Android development. Follow me on Twitter to read my ramblings about tech and email me at justin@jaduino.com. Tips are always welcome.