This Echo Show on the wall is the fairest smart display of them all. Updates to support Fire TV, new widget options, and a better Photo Frame mode make the flagship Echo a winner.
The original idea for Amazon’s Echo Show was a large screen-based device that would offer up relevant, glanceable information for the modern family, replacing outdated devices like bulletin boards, paper calendars, and sticky notes on the fridge. In 2017, Amazon couldn’t quite achieve that vision for a price that a modern family would be willing to pay. So, instead, it released a small, squat seven-inch touchscreen smart speaker that, frankly, did little more than Amazon’s screenless Echos.
But it was a start. And as the Echo Show has evolved over the ensuing years, the company finally has a device that it thinks fits that original vision: the Echo Show 15.
Samsung Galaxy S5 Review
The $249.99 Echo Show 15 is billed as a shared hub for families to see things like upcoming calendar appointments, to-dos, digital sticky note reminders, and shopping lists. It’s also an excellent kitchen TV thanks to the addition of the Fire TV interface. Of course, it does everything other Echo displays and speakers do, thanks to the presence of Amazon’s smart voice assistant Alexa. This includes playing music, showing weather reports, streaming video, controlling smart home gadgets, and telling fart jokes — all of the stuff you’ve come to rely on Alexa for.
A very solid piece of hardware, the Echo Show 15 is a stunning device. It looks impressive on your wall when called into action and otherwise blends into the background as a digital photo frame displaying art or family photos. It fills a niche that no device has reliably conquered to date: a wall-mounted tablet to replace the plethora of analog paper tools busy households traditionally rely on to communicate with each other. You can use it on your countertop with an optional stand if you can find the room — at 15.8 x 9.9 x 1.4 inches, this thing is huge — but the wall is the better option.
The concept is good. But the execution is underwhelming in places. As is a theme with Amazon devices, on day one, there was plenty of room for improvement on the software front. There’s a lot crammed onto this admittedly large screen, but ultimately, while the Echo Show 15 tries to be something for everyone, it ends up struggling to be particularly useful for anyone.
Huawei Matepad Paper Review: A Kindle Killer That Thinks It's A Tablet
The addition of Fire TV and the updated Photo Frame feature (which turns the entire display into a digital picture frame) since launch have significantly improved the device. You can read my full thoughts on the Fire TV experience here. But there are still areas for improvement. (Namely, the widgets, which I’ll get to.)
The Echo Show 15 can be mounted on the wall or on a counter (with an additional stand) in either portrait or landscape.
The Echo Show 15 is a 15.6-inch screen with a 1080p touch display, with the power of the new Amazon AZ2 neural edge processor behind it — the first Show to use Amazon’s latest chip. While it’s noticeably snappier than others in the family, it’s not super responsive and takes two or three seconds to respond to taps and swipes.
Nextcloud Review: Pros & Cons, Features, Ratings, Pricing And More
A new homescreen layout divides its time between the standard rotating Echo Show content (which you can customize) and a new feature: widgets. You can also have it just display art or photos (stored in Amazon Photos or Facebook, nowhere else, sadly), fulfilling its picture frame ambitions.
Aesthetically, the Echo Show has a black frame with a white mat, resembling a standard picture frame. Tech-wise it looks like the Samsung Frame TV and the Facebook Portal had a baby.
It comes in one color, and you can’t change the familiar Alexa blue background behind the widgets — I’d like to see some customization options all around. Two 1.6 speakers on either side (or top and bottom in portrait) provide decent if slightly tinny sound, and a small row of buttons on the top or side (depending on orientation) offer volume up / down, mute, and camera shutter controls.
A Highly Magnified Star At Redshift 6.2
The widget concept is a nice addition, and the potential is huge — especially as Amazon has released an API that developers can use to add widgets to their Alexa skills. When I first tested the device, there were a dozen or so Amazon widgets that were limited in their usefulness.
They include calendar and reminders (you can import calendars from Google, Apple, and Microsoft), shopping list, sticky notes, smart home controls, a to-do list (Alexa only), weather, your commute, photos, maps, music and audio, reorder suggestions, Alexa suggestions, and your Amazon deliveries. A “What to Eat” option offers up recipes and nearby delivery suggestions from partners such as Domino’s and Whole Foods.
In our app-driven world, you likely already have favorite tools that do most of these things, and frustratingly, you can’t port any of them to the Show. It’s mainly Amazon for now. A few developers have jumped on board in the last 12 months. There’s a Big Sky weather widget, one from
Amazon Echo Show 15 Review: Smart Display And Tv In One
, and an Ambient Visions widget that turns your Show display into video of Christmas scenes, a roaring fireplace, a tropical beach, a mountain lake, or — my favorite — an aquarium complete with sound effects. The Magic 8 Ball widget has been the most useful one in my household.
But the widgets are limited in terms of customization. While you can rearrange and resize some, if you have any enabled, they take up almost half of the screen. Interestingly, the widgets take the Show from being a voice-first device (which is something I’ve always struggled with) to one with a lot more touch functionality. It’s the most tactile Show to date, and the widgets invite you to come on in and stay awhile as you check your calendar, browse shows to watch, and attempt to control your smart home from the (limited) Smart Home widget (more on this later).
The Echo Show 15 is best suited for wall mounting and can be set to just display photos until someone approaches it, when it switches to the widget format.
Steam Deck Review: This Handheld Gaming Pc Surprised Me, In Ways Both Good And Bad
While the Show 15 is designed as a hub for family organization, it is not a great communication device. My biggest disappointment here is its 5-megapixel camera, which produced pixelated blown-out images during my Alexa calling and Drop-In testing. (Zoom is not supported). Despite the souped-up processor, video constantly freezes and lags, making it unusable for an actual conversation. It also doesn’t have the auto-framing of its Echo Show 8 and Show 10 counterparts, both of which have a more robust 13-megapixel camera.
It seems Amazon was looking for a differentiator from the Show 10, which Amazon tells me is its “communication device.” The rotating 10 can follow you around a room while you talk, keeping you in the frame as you chop veggies or unload the dishwasher. But who really is going to have a Show 10 and a Show 15 in their kitchen? Two $250 devices in one room seems like legitimate overkill. If they had bumped up the camera in the 15 to make video calling better, this would be a more useful device.
The best feature of the Show 15 is its size. To date, screens for the kitchen have either been too large (see GE Appliances’ monstrous screen built into an over-the-range hood) or too inflexible (Samsung’s Family Hub fridge with a portrait tablet built-in). The Show 15, like Goldilocks’ proverbial porridge, is just right — at least in terms of size.
Samsung Galaxy S10+ Review
The 15.6-inch screen’s housing is just shy of 10 inches tall and 16 inches wide and is designed to fit under standard kitchen cabinets or between two doorways in an open plan house, Chris Green, VP of industrial design at Amazon Lab126, tells me. It’s also very flexible. You can mount it on the wall in either a portrait or landscape orientation, and thanks to the included cleverly designed mount, it’s easy to swap it from one to the other when your use case changes.
A compelling reason to buy this is for a good-quality compact screen for watching TV while in the kitchen. It’s the first and only Echo Show to support a full Fire TV interface, which includes Netflix, Prime Video, Hulu, Disney Plus, HBO Max, Sling TV, YouTube TV, Paramount, Peacock, and YouTube and YouTube Kids, to name a few.
One downside, however, is that the 16:9 ratio of the screen means you get two black bars when watching widescreen movies. The white picture frame design also doesn’t lend itself to immersive viewing. You also have to use an onscreen remote to navigate most of the Fire TV apps (other than the main interface and Prime Video). You can pair it with an Alexa Voice Remote (third-gen), which is definitely better than using the on-screen remote, but still an odd move for a touchscreen smart display. Of course, as this is an Alexa device, voice is by far the best way to control
0 comments
Post a Comment