Aviv M

9 de marzo de 2024

These other reviews are pretty awful, read this

Originally I was going to maybe rate this 4 stars, but honestly, this is EXACTLY what I've been looking for and nothing even comes remotely close to it, so I'll go ahead and list everything it does great, followed by what needs improvements, and finally what you should NOT purchase this for... and at the end I'll go over the "general" stuff like screen and sound.IF YOU DON'T WANT TO PULL OUT YOUR PHONE & GO TO ALEXA APPThis is honestly the only reason you should be buying this. Because you can already do everything and more directly on the Alexa app on your phone. So you need to (a) see yourself using the Alexa app a lot, and (b) wish you had it on your wall.IF YOU HAVE SMART DEVICESWithout these, this is just an overpriced and very bad tablet. Maybe you want to control a few devices around your house like your lights, look at the front door camera. If your requirements aren't too specific with these and you just are willing to take what you can get, then this is it.IF YOU HAVE MULTIPLE OTHER ALEXA SPEAKERSThis really does help bring them together, because you now have a screen, although you might save some money if you get one of the other Echo Show devices. It's cool to have it up on the wall, be able to again, not use your phone, not pull out some tablet, to change songs.IF YOU WANT A GENERAL OVERVIEW OF SECURITY & THERMOSTATThis will display your Ring alarm status, let you arm and disarm it, and see what your thermostat is set to from another location across the house (I wouldn't recommend putting them side by side, that's a waste.)IF YOU WANT YOUR HOME TO FEEL "MODERN" SMARTThis reminds me of things I've seen at high-end hotels. It's just cool to have a touchscreen tablet on the wall, and be able to adjust some lights, play music, adjust the temperature.___________________DO >>NOT<< BUY FOR:1) Managing your device settings. This does a poor job. Your phone can do better. This should only be there to access frequently used devices you've already set up but don't want to navigate through your phone to access.2) Speakers. This isn't it. The sound isn't awful but it's not great, and you should only use this as a supplement to other speakers you already have in your home.3) Watching videos. Don't do it. I know you might think it'll be nice to put this in the kitchen and watch something while you cook, just get some other display or tablet.4) Controlling everything. This kind of ties into #1 above but this should only be set it and forget it, quickly click what you can fit on the screen, and overview of your devices per room. Don't spend a lot of time navigating around. Just get any other tablet at that point.5) Highly specific apps. The apps on it are lackluster. Have some really cool specific idea? You won't be able to do it or it'll end up being bad. You likely won't be able to do exactly what you want, only as I mentioned very very very basic things.__________________THE REALLY BAD, DEFINITELY DON'T BUY:1) Device groups. Currently not supported. If you "favorite" a group of smart devices, it doesn't display it and you can pretty much only do one device at a time, with the "group" being the entire group like "Living Room." This was almost a deal-breaker for me, hopefully they add it later, but I've since found some workarounds for me specific use case. But I wanted to group four mart lights in a room, per room, and have it all display under favorites and could not do that.2) Smooth tablet experience. Nope, this is going to feel like a really cheap tablet because it is a really cheap tablet. You're going to have to be patient and wait one second or maybe even two for some things, and you'll see it stutter once in a while. This is still miles better than anything else like it that's meant to go on your wall. But probably one of the worst if you're comparing it to an iPad or high-end Samsung tablet.__________________The Screen:Feels like a really cheap tablet, but they make it work for what it is. The size could have been bigger but honestly then it'd look weird and not like a wall panel. I like it, I just wish there was some more customizability (there isn't really.)The Audio:Again, feels like a really cheap tablet or laptop.The Design:Works out for being wall-mounted. I like the big bezel.Portability:No. Almost none. Do not expect to unplug this and move it around.The Software:Needs some work but it's not as terrible as people make it out to be. I've noticed a few minor bugs like arming my Ring if a device needs a bypass gets it stuck with no error, just loading. Smart thermostat (Nest) if you try to set it to let's say 72 to 73, it will error out vaguely when you should remember that you need a bigger gap between the low and high number. Cameras take a bit to load but they also do that on the apps in any case. It'll only get better from here.The Cost:I wish it would have been closer to $100, but hey, I bought it at full price because I saw the value. If you do not see the value, do not buy it, you'll be disappointed. This is the type of product that's simultaneously worth $50 and $500.Ver más

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Kayla DeMarco

10 de julio de 2026

Nice addition to our smart home

We’ve slowly added more smart home devices over the years, so having everything in one place has been really convenient. The Echo Hub makes it easy to control compatible lights, cameras, routines, and other smart devices without constantly pulling out my phone.The screen is bright and responsive, and I like that the layout is simple enough that anyone in the house can use it. Setup was straightforward, and it integrated with our existing Alexa devices without much effort.It’s become a nice central control panel for our smart home. If you already have several Alexa-compatible devices, this is a really useful upgrade that makes managing everything much easier.Ver más

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Jay

4 de marzo de 2024

This all but sucks - slow and does little

UPDATE: 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.

Carey Bernier

Nice but Not Perfect - InWall Install is Difficult at Best

I generally really like the Echo Hub. As others have said, it's not an Echo Show, but a smart home center that can pull your cameras, Ring Alarms, Ring keypads, lights, switches, and other smart devices into a nice wall-mounted panel that offers convenience apart from your phone. It's meant to be set up, customized, and left alone. It's not meant to watch TV or interact with like a Show. I have one for each floor of a three-story house and another in our primary bedroom. Three are powered by the 12-volt wire that was already in the wall from our old security system, and one is powered by splitting off the PoE of an already existing in-wall ethernet port in the adjacent room.The Black Friday sale made these much more palatable at just over $100 each and I made my own fast-charging power adapters for just under $6 each. This is my biggest complaint with the Echo Hub. They aren't really PoE compliant or ready since they don't have an ethernet port and they don't just require a Power Delivery (PD) adapter like Amazon states. They require a PD3.0 or PD3.1 adapter that optionally supports Programmable Power Supply (PPS). After a couple of weeks of trial and error I made four power adapters from AITRIP PD65W Fast Charging Type-C USB modules that provided the proper PPS power. I added a REVODATA Gigabit PoE Splitter ($13 additional) to power one of them with 12-volts and 2-amps (24 watt) while maintaining the ethernet data port in the adjacent room. The Hubs look professionally installed since all the power connections are completely hidden in the wall.I also bought the Hubs for Thread and Matter support of window shades. Unfortunately, they didn't play nicely with other Echo's nearby, so I disconnected them. Thread connections are much more stable now. However, the shade motors will sometimes flash that they have disconnected. They usually reconnect but will occasionally become unresponsive and show as such in the Alexa app. Thread simply isn't ready for primetime. At least I have new Hub border routers and a several Thread shades to test software update stability. I wish I could talk to a second-tier engineer instead of getting canned responses from Amazon. Oh well.I didn't give 5-stars to the Echo Hub. There are more issues, mostly minor, than just the power and Thread issues.1. The interface is SLOW. It needs more horsepower to be more responsive!2. I think the Hubs looks pretty nice on the wall but could be more modern looking by being thinner and having smaller bezels.3. One of the four Hubs shipped with a faulty power adapter that gave a startup error as many others have mentioned.4. I find the brightness of the screen to be very difficult to precisely control. The Hub tries too hard to be "smart". Why not allow the user to set the exact lowest and highest brightness settings?5. The proximity sensor works well, but I turned it off because the only option to allow the screen to toggle back to the main clock interface takes 10 minutes and can't be adjusted. WTH? The Hubs are wall-mounted in the highest traffic areas to make them accessible, especially for disarming the Ring alarms. The clock and background images almost never show when proximity is turned on since someone is almost always passing by.

Miguel Yanez

A hustle for power compatibility... But totally worth it! Perfect solution for our house

I moved to a house last year and installed all kind of smart devices: switches, locks, motion sensors, thermostats, and cameras (indoor and outdoor) which I wanted to manage not just from our phones, but from a central console, and the echo hub seemed like the perfect fit when it was announced.The previous owner had an ADT console which was not compatible with any of the smart devices I installed, so I took it out of the wall and waited 6 months for the echo hub to be released. When I could finally buy it I was really excited, but then the hustle began...The old console was working with in-wall low-voltage generic cables. Voltage was 9V, which was what the echo hub needed according to the manual. However, when I connected it showed an error due to "not enough power".I was reluctant to do out-of-wall cable management at first, so I was really close to do a big hole in the wall to connect an outlet from a close-by light switch, but the echo hub is so small that the edges of the recessed electrical box would show. And yes, I wrote recessed "electrical box" because all the recessed outlets I found were too small to fit the echo hub outlet connector (which is massive)...At the end I settled for out-of-wall cable management and it is fine, we like it and cable length was just perfect to reach the closest outlet as shown in the picture.Once installed and connected, everything has worked as intended. All my kasa, eufy, nest and amazon devices have synced with no problem and the multi-camera display for the outdoor ones is really amazing and useful. We created a speaker group including the hub and music sounds great with different echos synced perfectly reproducing surround sound. Sound quality of the device is good for the size. Proximity sensor works great. The possibility to reproduce amazon photos as screensaver is very nice. We have not tried playing video, but it seems to be possible via different apps.In summary, power connectivity could be easily improved including a rechargeable battery as any tablet, so generic low-voltage cables (5V or 9V) work and you are not bounded to use their connector. However, the reality is that the hub was exactly what we needed and wanted as smart home central console, consolidating everything together in a great way. I have not found anything even close to this wall-mounted solution in the market so compatible with other brands (and have researched extensively). I hope it keeps working like it has been doing so far.

Warrens Views

25 de febrero de 2026

Not as great as it could be.

For an Amazon device, this one falls short in my opinion for the long term. Out of the box it works great. Fresh and new, it works and updates and controls the Blink devices. Yet after about 8 months, it's starting to show technology wear, as many of the widgets continue to go "offline", requiring either deletion and addition of the app again, or reseting the device with requires unplugging for 30 seconds than plugging back in. There is not an option on the device to power down or reset. Only option is unplugging, and after 8 months, this is becoming a once a week action to keep even the simplest widget work, with right not is the Amazon Shopping List. It's their list, there software, and their design, yet it keeps crashing and going offline. It's very sad. So much potential, but at this cost, it's a wast in my opinion.Ver más