Amazon Echo Show Review - Is This Thing Worth it

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enthe Amazon Echo and its various shapes and forms have been around for a few years now but have always just been purely an audio device but that has now changed with the brand new Amazon Echo Show which takes a huge leap by adding a screen this gives it some new abilities that aren't possible in any of the other versions but are they really that big a deal if the other versions work totally fine without a screen does having one even make a difference let's find out and I'll put a link in the description if if you want to check it out as well as usual we'll start out with the hardware the physical device itself it has a blocky geometric design with sharp angles and Corners which I actually like it's pretty much the opposite design of the cylindrical Echoes but it's a modern look and I think it will fit in well on any countertop one thing I did notice though immediately after taking it out of the box was how fat the thing is I mean I don't think any of the images on Amazon site truly show the depth of the device but at least the angled shape of it actually hides most of the back unless you're looking at it from the side but we're not going to look at the side instead we're going to start off looking at the front which has the main feature the touch screen a pair of speakers at the bottom and a front camera at the top the screen is a reasonable 7 in and while Amazon doesn't specify the resolution anywhere on the product page the developer Page Reveals it to be a surprisingly low 1024x600 resolution however I will say that I would not have guessed that it would be that low because the panel's overall image quality is great so all the text looks sharp color and contrast is good and nothing looks pixelated it also gets pretty bright if you want so I'm happy with the screen the speakers at the bottom aren't visible behind the grill but the concept photos reveal that they're pretty big which I assume is the reason behind Amazon Echo shows thickness there's no doubt that the sound on the Echo Show is better than the regular Echo it gets Extremely Loud and can easily fill the room that being said though I still feel like the overall sound had a bit of a muddy quality almost like they kind of artificially cranked up the base like a pair of Beats headphones or something I mean there isn't much separation between like the vocals and the instruments like you'd really get with a good pair of speakers for its size though it is impressive but if sound quality is your top priority you'll do better to just buy a dedicated quality speaker at the top of the show we have a familiar set of buttons we have volume up and down and mute when you press the mute button it turns off both the microphone and the front camera and it lights up a small LED that is red above the screen and the screen will have an orange bar at the bottom so you know also at the top there's an arrangement of eight microphones just like with the regular Echo to ensure that it can hear you all the way across the room and finally on the back it's just a power plug so now that we know what we're dealing with let's get into the actual features and using the thing the interface is extremely simple and is clearly meant to be mostly used by voice there's a no list of apps to swipe through and actually no way to really navigate past the home screen at all on one hand this is nice because it maintains the handfree feeling but also kind of makes the screen seem a little bit redundant almost like an afterthought most of the informational task you'd use with Echo never required a screen so it usually just ends up displaying the same exact thing it's saying it doesn't really need to be there that isn't always the case though and there are some cases where the screen does add pretty good functionality when you're asking for the forecast for example maybe you don't want to wait for the echo to read out the entire week's weather and just want a quick glance at what the temperatures are which this will show you it also makes the shopping list more useful since you can actually see and scroll through the list when normally you'd have to go to the Alexa app and do that and when you have multiple alarms and timer set you can see a list of them all at once it can also use some services like YouTube where you ask it to show a video about whatever and it will but again the functionality here is super limited because it just does a search and plays the first result with no option to choose more specifically so if it mishears you or if what you want isn't the top result well that's just tough touching the screen while a video is playing doesn't really help either it just pauses the video with no further interface at all the the only exception to the lack of interface is the drop- down bar you can access by swiping down from the top of the screen this isn't even well documented and there's no visual cue that you can even do that but it gives you a button to return to home adjust brightness and enable do not disturb and bring up the settings menu which appears to be the only menu there are actually a lot of options in here to play around with including customizing the home screen background photo changing what info Cycles through the home screen and changing the wward many but not all of the settings are adjustable through the companion app like enabling adaptive screen brightness can only be done on the device but there is one feature that is completely new with the Amazon Echo Show which is interesting to say the least it's called drop in and honestly I have no idea what the hell Amazon is thinking with this one drop in when enabled allows other people within your house or selected contacts to just pop on your Echo shows screen whenever they want no approval needed not only that but they can see your side of things through your camera so yes they could just see in your house without any approval on your side at all I cannot imagine anyone in their right mind wanting this enabled now there is a warning that someone is dropping in because it Chimes and shows a green light and that person will see a frosted screen for 10 seconds in this time frame you can reject the drop in but I think everyone can see why that doesn't really make things any better imagine a situation where you just step out of the shower realize you left the fridge door open or something and quickly rush to the kitchen to close it before you get dressed and as soon as you walk in Surprise your friend is staring back at you awesome Amazon claims that the dropin feature might be used as a type of baby monitor or to check in on elderly relatives yeah right I don't care how old you are no one wants people just being able to pop in unannounced and see what you're doing at any given time nobody wants that can we show Grandma sure Alexa drop in on Grandma drop in on Grandma drop in on Grandma so yeah the drop in feature is incredibly stupid so make sure it's disabled on all of your Echo devices even if you don't have an Echo Show it's it can be used in all the devices they claim it's disabled by default but when I went through all my devices in the Echo app it was enabled on them when I definitely did not do that but in any case I'm probably G to put tape over the camera anyway because frankly I don't trust Amazon enough for that especially because when you walk into a room it changes the screen to the home screen so that just shows that the camera is on all the time even if it's not recording no thanks all right now the final thing we need to go over are the so-called Alexa skills which are basically additional apps made by Third parties that add functionality to your Echo devices these are available on all Echo devices but now they'll be able to take advantage of the screen when used on an Echo Show there aren't really that many that do support the show yet but that's not surprising considering it just came out and there's at least one that is pretty neat which is the nest cam skill and this lets you say show me the camera wherever and it will actually bring up a live feed of your nest camera if we can get more skills that add this kind of practical functionality I'd be pretty happy so let's finish up this review by answering the simple question is the Amazon Echo Show worth it right now it costs $200 $30 it's the most expensive Echo device to date personally I haven't found myself actually using the video features very much if I want to watch a YouTube video it just makes more sense to search it on my phone and find the specific one if you plan to do video calls of some kind then maybe it might be useful but then the other person would also need an echo show or use the mobile app and I don't think most people will go through that trouble ironically I think the best part about the Echo Show is the speakers not the screen if if you don't have any Echo device and want one and you also want a smart speaker well this could be a good way to kill two birds with one stone really the screen just kind of feels like an extra little convenience feature as opposed to like a primary selling point and one other thing about the Echo Show is in my opinion it's much more conspicuous than any of the other Echo devices just by the nature of it you can't really tuck it away anywhere like I said it's pretty fat so you can't put it too close to a wall and this with the screen always always on it's going to be immediately drawing your attention when you walk in the room even if it's just sitting at the home screen so if you want my overall opinion I'd just say it's not necessary the screen doesn't add much in terms of functionality because both native features and most add-on skills have to support the least common denominator which is an echo without a screen so unless you really like the idea of a screen which you might it's probably best to just go with a regular Amazon Echo or even an echo dot so that's my review you can let me know what you think down in the comments below if you want to keep watching I'll put some other videos right here that you can click on and also consider following me on Twitter I almost never mention that one on here so figured I would but anyway thanks so much for watching guys I'll see you next time have a good onethe Amazon Echo and its various shapes and forms have been around for a few years now but have always just been purely an audio device but that has now changed with the brand new Amazon Echo Show which takes a huge leap by adding a screen this gives it some new abilities that aren't possible in any of the other versions but are they really that big a deal if the other versions work totally fine without a screen does having one even make a difference let's find out and I'll put a link in the description if if you want to check it out as well as usual we'll start out with the hardware the physical device itself it has a blocky geometric design with sharp angles and Corners which I actually like it's pretty much the opposite design of the cylindrical Echoes but it's a modern look and I think it will fit in well on any countertop one thing I did notice though immediately after taking it out of the box was how fat the thing is I mean I don't think any of the images on Amazon site truly show the depth of the device but at least the angled shape of it actually hides most of the back unless you're looking at it from the side but we're not going to look at the side instead we're going to start off looking at the front which has the main feature the touch screen a pair of speakers at the bottom and a front camera at the top the screen is a reasonable 7 in and while Amazon doesn't specify the resolution anywhere on the product page the developer Page Reveals it to be a surprisingly low 1024x600 resolution however I will say that I would not have guessed that it would be that low because the panel's overall image quality is great so all the text looks sharp color and contrast is good and nothing looks pixelated it also gets pretty bright if you want so I'm happy with the screen the speakers at the bottom aren't visible behind the grill but the concept photos reveal that they're pretty big which I assume is the reason behind Amazon Echo shows thickness there's no doubt that the sound on the Echo Show is better than the regular Echo it gets Extremely Loud and can easily fill the room that being said though I still feel like the overall sound had a bit of a muddy quality almost like they kind of artificially cranked up the base like a pair of Beats headphones or something I mean there isn't much separation between like the vocals and the instruments like you'd really get with a good pair of speakers for its size though it is impressive but if sound quality is your top priority you'll do better to just buy a dedicated quality speaker at the top of the show we have a familiar set of buttons we have volume up and down and mute when you press the mute button it turns off both the microphone and the front camera and it lights up a small LED that is red above the screen and the screen will have an orange bar at the bottom so you know also at the top there's an arrangement of eight microphones just like with the regular Echo to ensure that it can hear you all the way across the room and finally on the back it's just a power plug so now that we know what we're dealing with let's get into the actual features and using the thing the interface is extremely simple and is clearly meant to be mostly used by voice there's a no list of apps to swipe through and actually no way to really navigate past the home screen at all on one hand this is nice because it maintains the handfree feeling but also kind of makes the screen seem a little bit redundant almost like an afterthought most of the informational task you'd use with Echo never required a screen so it usually just ends up displaying the same exact thing it's saying it doesn't really need to be there that isn't always the case though and there are some cases where the screen does add pretty good functionality when you're asking for the forecast for example maybe you don't want to wait for the echo to read out the entire week's weather and just want a quick glance at what the temperatures are which this will show you it also makes the shopping list more useful since you can actually see and scroll through the list when normally you'd have to go to the Alexa app and do that and when you have multiple alarms and timer set you can see a list of them all at once it can also use some services like YouTube where you ask it to show a video about whatever and it will but again the functionality here is super limited because it just does a search and plays the first result with no option to choose more specifically so if it mishears you or if what you want isn't the top result well that's just tough touching the screen while a video is playing doesn't really help either it just pauses the video with no further interface at all the the only exception to the lack of interface is the drop- down bar you can access by swiping down from the top of the screen this isn't even well documented and there's no visual cue that you can even do that but it gives you a button to return to home adjust brightness and enable do not disturb and bring up the settings menu which appears to be the only menu there are actually a lot of options in here to play around with including customizing the home screen background photo changing what info Cycles through the home screen and changing the wward many but not all of the settings are adjustable through the companion app like enabling adaptive screen brightness can only be done on the device but there is one feature that is completely new with the Amazon Echo Show which is interesting to say the least it's called drop in and honestly I have no idea what the hell Amazon is thinking with this one drop in when enabled allows other people within your house or selected contacts to just pop on your Echo shows screen whenever they want no approval needed not only that but they can see your side of things through your camera so yes they could just see in your house without any approval on your side at all I cannot imagine anyone in their right mind wanting this enabled now there is a warning that someone is dropping in because it Chimes and shows a green light and that person will see a frosted screen for 10 seconds in this time frame you can reject the drop in but I think everyone can see why that doesn't really make things any better imagine a situation where you just step out of the shower realize you left the fridge door open or something and quickly rush to the kitchen to close it before you get dressed and as soon as you walk in Surprise your friend is staring back at you awesome Amazon claims that the dropin feature might be used as a type of baby monitor or to check in on elderly relatives yeah right I don't care how old you are no one wants people just being able to pop in unannounced and see what you're doing at any given time nobody wants that can we show Grandma sure Alexa drop in on Grandma drop in on Grandma drop in on Grandma so yeah the drop in feature is incredibly stupid so make sure it's disabled on all of your Echo devices even if you don't have an Echo Show it's it can be used in all the devices they claim it's disabled by default but when I went through all my devices in the Echo app it was enabled on them when I definitely did not do that but in any case I'm probably G to put tape over the camera anyway because frankly I don't trust Amazon enough for that especially because when you walk into a room it changes the screen to the home screen so that just shows that the camera is on all the time even if it's not recording no thanks all right now the final thing we need to go over are the so-called Alexa skills which are basically additional apps made by Third parties that add functionality to your Echo devices these are available on all Echo devices but now they'll be able to take advantage of the screen when used on an Echo Show there aren't really that many that do support the show yet but that's not surprising considering it just came out and there's at least one that is pretty neat which is the nest cam skill and this lets you say show me the camera wherever and it will actually bring up a live feed of your nest camera if we can get more skills that add this kind of practical functionality I'd be pretty happy so let's finish up this review by answering the simple question is the Amazon Echo Show worth it right now it costs $200 $30 it's the most expensive Echo device to date personally I haven't found myself actually using the video features very much if I want to watch a YouTube video it just makes more sense to search it on my phone and find the specific one if you plan to do video calls of some kind then maybe it might be useful but then the other person would also need an echo show or use the mobile app and I don't think most people will go through that trouble ironically I think the best part about the Echo Show is the speakers not the screen if if you don't have any Echo device and want one and you also want a smart speaker well this could be a good way to kill two birds with one stone really the screen just kind of feels like an extra little convenience feature as opposed to like a primary selling point and one other thing about the Echo Show is in my opinion it's much more conspicuous than any of the other Echo devices just by the nature of it you can't really tuck it away anywhere like I said it's pretty fat so you can't put it too close to a wall and this with the screen always always on it's going to be immediately drawing your attention when you walk in the room even if it's just sitting at the home screen so if you want my overall opinion I'd just say it's not necessary the screen doesn't add much in terms of functionality because both native features and most add-on skills have to support the least common denominator which is an echo without a screen so unless you really like the idea of a screen which you might it's probably best to just go with a regular Amazon Echo or even an echo dot so that's my review you can let me know what you think down in the comments below if you want to keep watching I'll put some other videos right here that you can click on and also consider following me on Twitter I almost never mention that one on here so figured I would but anyway thanks so much for watching guys I'll see you next time have a good one\n"