Top critical review
3.0 out of 5 starsGood, but a little buggy
Reviewed in the United States on November 26, 2023
This is the first Echo Show I've set up, but I'm pretty tech savvy. Here's the pros and cons so far.
Pros
- Looks like a bedside clock (if you set it up that way) and is not very noticeable. I like this.
- Sound seems good so far. This is why I bought this model when it was on sale. I heard the sound quality on older models wasn't as good. This one is pretty loud. I'm happy with that.
- Has a slider to cover the camera if you want privacy
- Has a button on top to turn off the microphone and Alexa 'Listening" if you want (you'll see a red bar at the bottom of the screen if you do this.)
- I like the Drop In feature.
- I like that it also has a home monitoring feature (but it doesn't work right)
- This can also supposedly sense motion and trigger alexa skills for that too, but I haven't tried that yet. I dont' believe they are true motion sensors. I believe they detect motion using the camera. If the camera is covered, there'd be no motion sensing.
Cons
- It's small. But I knew that. The screen is about the same size as a smartphone turned on its side.
- If you're making a video call to this, and you are using a cell phone in portrait view, your image is going to be so tiny on this echo show's screen! It'll be vertical and in the center. It won't enlarge to fill the screen. Best way to call this device will be from a tablet or or something else in horizontal view. (With a camera that is centered and not off to the side, when it's horizontal.)
- "Home Monitoring" worked the first day, and I could not get it to work after that. I don't know why. It's frustrating and annoying. I did everything I could think of, short of calling customer support (which I'll try another day) I read that this is a common problem.
- There's a lag sometimes, especially with the app I'm using on my phone, to connect to this. That makes it hard to know sometimes if you need to press a button again. Also, any time you change a setting, you might get stuck/frozen for a while, while it updates with amazon's cloud. Sometimes I had to unplug it and plug it back in, to get it out of that loop.
- No battery. If this gets unplugged or power goes out, this won't work. You also can't move it around the room (because it's plugged in!) - Again, I knew this beforehand. FYI, I wanted to use a fire tablet in "show mode" to get around this problem, but the tablets are not loud enough. I needed a loud device for video calls. This echo show IS loud.
- I wanted to make a widget with an alexa skill to make a tappable shortcut for a phonecall. I could not find a way to do this. It might be possible, but I could not find instructions for this online, and customer support could not help me with this either.
- I did eneable "Tap to Alexa" for a while (then later disabled it). That might work ok for someone who has speech difficulty, and needs visual buttons. But if you're trying to add buttons to simplify this for a more debilitated person or someone who doesn't know a lot about tech, that won't help much. The text under the tiles is small, the icons for the tiles can only be customized with an image from the built in set - and they all look similar. There's no way to customize a tile enough to make it stand out, so someone knows "THIS is the button you press to call me!" You also cannot fully customize the tiles screen. Some tiles cannot be deleted or re-arranged. (others can.)
- This doesn't have night vision. I knew this already. If a room is dim or dark it's hard to see the other person and that room.
Mostly it's a little buggy. I'm hoping things will work better as I get more used to working with it.
The lag sometimes is frustrating.
Things not working that worked the day before, is frustrating.
Having SO MANY SETTINGS to customize is frustrating. Most related to extras I don't want to be shown. Ads, suggestions, "Try this!" etc. I want this to be a clock that can make video calls. That's all I want to do with this. It is difficult to find ALL the settings you need to find, to simplify it to that. It's great that it can do so many other things, but I want this to be more simplified, and that's not easy to do.
I may report back later (I may not ;) ) once I've used it more. I really like all the things about it that work. I'm a little frustrated by some of the bugginess.