Echo Show First Impression
I really like my Amazon Echos.
I have an original Echo and an Echo Dot and use them constantly. I won’t say I’m anything like a power user, but I do use them.
I have three smart lightbulbs and control them from my Echos. They’re particularly good in the nightstands in our bedroom. We go to bed with the lights on, get all comfortable, and turn the lights off with a voice command. Sometimes we have our Echo lull us to sleep with thunderstorm sounds. And we play music with it quite a bit, either by streaming from a phone or by using the built-in links to Pandora and/or I Heart Radio.
I use them to set timers and alarms. I use their very convenient shopping list, which I have hooked up to my iOS Reminders app via IFTTT. IFTTT also helps me add to-do items on Echo and convert them to Todoist. They look up information for me, which works sometimes, but not often enough. And of course there’s their most important use – playing Jeopardy every day. I don’t want to live life without Jeopardy.
Oh, and I just remembered I have an Echo Wand. I think I may be the only person who bought one, but look it up. It’s kind of a slightly crippled handheld Echo that has a laser barcode scanner. You scan used-up items you want to replace, for example, and it adds them to your Amazon shopping cart. I’m casually waiting for somebody else to come up with an IFTTT recipe to remove items from my shopping cart and add them to my Reminders shopping list. Then my Wand will become very useful indeed.
In short, Alexa is an integral part of our household.
Which brings me to my latest purchase – the Echo Show. It’s a pretty clever Echo with good speakers (maybe not quite as good as on my original Echo, but good), coupled with a camera and always-on 7-inch touchscreen. It can do a bunch of unique stuff, including acting as a videophone, displaying recipes, playing Amazon Video movies, and … umm … stuff. In general, I like it. So what’s good and what’s bad?
The good:
The screen is always on and displaying useful information when it senses somebody is in the vicinity. You can refine what kinds of things it shows you, which I haven’t done yet, but I might eventually get around to it.
I really like being able to see the status of my timers. I use it for timing things in the kitchen all the time, and I always had to ask it for its status when I wanted to know how much time was left. Not anymore!
I actually watched part of a movie while cooking once! It’s a pretty cool idea, although it only works with Amazon Prime movies, which I don’t watch all that much. Still, it’s there and I like using it.
The sound is fine and it’s nice to be able to see what’s playing.
The bad:
My other Echos offer a visual indicator that they’ve heard their wake word, in the form of a moving bright blue light along the top edge that’s visible from across the room. There’s no light on this one. The screen shows a moving blue bar along its bottom edge, but that’s only useful when you’re standing right next to it. Otherwise, you just have to assume it’s on and listening to you. Not a huge deal, but I’ve been surprised at how much I miss that visual confirmation that she’s listening before I ask my question.
Nobody else has one, so the video phone function is fairly useless. Plus, I don’t want to have to stand in my kitchen to talk to somebody, and my phone, iPad, and computers all have a much more flexible version of that capability already.
It’s kind of expensive.
When I bought my first Echo, I thought it was kind of cool but doubted I would ever really use it very much. Then I discovered more and more of its capabilities over time, and now it’s an indispensable member of our household. I have a feeling this version will turn out the same way. Recommended.