Hands on: I tested the Logitech Rally Bar Huddle – see what I thought of this smart all-in-one conferencing solution

Logitech’s traditional Rally Bar video conferencing (VC) room solutions offer an incredible range of features, but small businesses may be put off by their size. Enter the Rally Bar Huddle, which steps in below the Mini model, and is designed for meeting rooms of up to six participants.

Width-wise, the Huddle is 170mm shorter than the Mini and weighs less than half as much. Its 4K UHD camera dispenses with the motorized pan, tilt and zoom (PTZ) functions used by its bigger brothers and goes fully digital.

There’s room for Logitech’s standard six-microphone beamforming array for auto-framing of active participants, while audio output is handled by a single downward-firing ported speaker. The graphite fabric magnetic front cover can be swapped out for an off-white fabric version for £109 or a white plastic cleanable cover, which costs £129.

As with Logitech’s other Rally Bars, the Huddle supports three operational modes, and you can connect it to a dedicated room computer or let users bring their own device (BYOD) and load the VC app of their choice. In appliance mode, Logitech’s on-board Android-based CollabOS turns the Huddle into a standalone system, with it currently supporting Microsoft Teams Rooms and Zoom Rooms.

Deployment is smooth. After connecting the Huddle’s gigabit network port (Wi-Fi 5 is also available) we used its web interface to choose BYOD, Teams or Zoom mode. We could access all audio and video settings, run firmware upgrades and enable Logitech’s RightSight 2 video enhancement technology, although only the Group view was available, with the Speaker and Grid views yet to be implemented.

Load Logitech’s Sync app on the host PC and you can add the Huddle to a Sync cloud account for remote management of all your Logitech room devices and room usage analytics. The Huddle also supports Logitech’s optional Tap IP and Scheduler touchscreen tablets.

BYOD mode is easy to use: we connected a Windows 10 host PC to the camera’s HDMI-in port and an HD monitor to its HDMI-out port and used our local Teams, Skype and Zoom VC apps. Configuring the Huddle in appliance mode is equally swift. We chose Teams from the web console and, after a reboot, used the unique code it presented to assign it to our Microsoft 365 account. The Huddle duly appeared in our Teams admin console as a new Teams Rooms on Android device, while our attached Full HD monitor presented the familiar Microsoft Teams interface.

Connect a PC over USB and the Huddle will swap to BYOD mode and back to Teams when you remove the cable, although we noted that in Teams mode the web console was disabled and returning the Huddle to BYOD-only mode requires it to be reset to defaults.

The camera delivers a sharply focused image with good color balance, and its backlight compensation works very well.

Sound quality from the single speaker is easily good enough for small meeting rooms, and we liked the Huddle’s motorized privacy shutter, which automatically closes when a meeting has finished.

The Huddle’s digital PTZ speaker tracking is much faster than Logitech’s other Rally Bars, which can often take up to eight seconds to respond to movement. During a Teams meeting, we wandered around our room as we spoke and the camera smoothly tracked us with delays of no more than three seconds.

Some features are yet to be added, but Logitech’s Rally Bar Huddle is a good choice for small businesses with equally small meeting rooms. Speaker tracking is the fastest of all the available Rally Bars, audio and video quality are good, and Logitech’s integral CollabOS adds extra versatility.

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