Customer Review
- Reviewed in the United States on March 4, 2024UPDATE: it's worse than I thought. I decided to return it, but Amazon is making it very difficult to return. There is a Kohls a short walk form my house, but Amazon wants me to drive 45 minutes to a drop-off location. They know this thing sucks, maybe that's why they don't want to make it easy to return.
This is a huge disappointment. Alexa is awesome because it's the hub that ties all of your smart home devices together. But there was never a good interface. The app is messy, and sometimes voice isn't the best way to control devices. I was hoping that this device called a hub would be the perfect solution. It's not. You need to own one to realize how bad it really is.
Here are some examples...
-The screen is REALLY sluggish. It's like a $30 no-name android tablet.
-The icons are big and few can fit on the screen.
-some screens will only display one icon at a time... I need to use the sluggish screen to scroll one at a time to see things when there is room for everything in that category.
-you can't easily - maybe not at all - customize the home screen.
-if you tap the weather widget, after a delay, you get a full screen showing only the outside temperature. That is much less than the widget shows. I expected to see more detail in full screen, not less.
-It's great that it can show the status and limited control of my cielo thermostats, but... The control is temp up or down, and the power toggles on or off. Those three buttons don't fit on the full screen - you need to scroll to see the three buttons. Seriously... the full screen will not show you three buttons at once. You need to scroll.
- you can't view and set alarms for other echo devices from it.
-you can see your ring cameras. And that works pretty well.
-it sees all of my Insteon light switches (that I have given an Alexa name), but I can't organize then in a way that's usable. There's all on and all off buttons at the top of the lighting screen that is useless. I use an all lights off scene every night - but it's not literally ALL of the lights. There are a few that need to stay on until the timer turns them off.
-Maybe it's possible, but I can't figure out how to make it play music on my Sonos. I can't even figure out how to make it play music on another Echo.
-It can use POE, but Amazon won't tell you how. Plus, how do you reboot it it you have it built into the wall?
How is this any better than an echo show? If I were the project manager for this device, I would not let my boss see this version of it. It's really bad.
I gave it two stars because I want it to be great, and I suspect there are ways to make it do more things I can't figure out. In my hands, it's a one star product.
I think I will return it. Maybe next year there will be a better one. The screen is so sluggish, that it must be an under powered CPU, not just bad programming.
All of the YouTubers are pretty optimistic about this product, but I suspect it's only because they want to keep a good rapport with Amazon so they will always get new products early.
