Amazon Echo Show
Put away your cynicism: it turns out that adding a screen to the Echo was a phenomenally good idea
SCORE ✪✪✪✪✪ PRICE £167 (£200 inc VAT) from pcpro.link/280shows
Step back in time a decade or two and one of the most popular predictions, alongside flying cars and a life of leisure for everyone, was that we’d all be communicating via video phone. Every sci-fi movie or TV show, from Blade Runner to The Jetsons, fancifully suggested that by now we’d all be calling each other on small, square flickery displays and that the traditional telephone would be dead.
Some of this has come to pass – video calling is now a reality and surely nobody uses a landline anymore – but the static video phone has never quite caught on. Until, perhaps, 2018. Amazon’s Echo Show is a glimpse of the future that previous predictions never quite got right.
As ever with Amazon’s most exciting products, the Echo Show isn’t exactly new. In fact, our US cousins have been enjoying it since May 2017. Still, it’s here at last and, weirdly, it’s rather good.
I say weirdly because I wasn’t expecting the Show to bowl me over. After all, the Echo speakers have been exclusively voice-driven products, and they’ve enjoyed success because of that. But, it turns out, adding a screen does improve the Echo. And because Amazon has taken care not to add too many tablet- or phone-style features, the Echo Show doesn’t feel like just another touchscreen device.
What does the touchscreen add?
One thing that’s clear from the off is that this is no normal Echo speaker. It’s blocky, angular and, some might say, a little on the ugly side compared with the compact, fabric-clad, second-generation Amazon Echo ( see p62). But you can’t put a rectangular screen on a cylinder, so something had to change. Such as the entire design. The Amazon Echo Show’s 7in, 1,024 x 600-resolution display is mounted above a rectangular speaker grille on a front panel that’s tilted back at a slight angle to make it easier to read, and there’s a 5-megapixel webcam mounted above it. The heavy base is covered with a thick layer of rubber so it doesn’t tip over when prodded. The whole thing is minimalist in an oddly pleasing way. The only controls you’ll find on the Echo Show itself are the touchscreen and a collection of three buttons arranged in a line on the top panel (volume up, volume down, plus a handy mute button), surrounded by perforations that hide the Show’s far-field microphone array. Don’t be fooled by its looks, though: this is still an Echo speaker, and it does everything a regular Echo can do. It can answer general questions, play music and find recipes, set timers and alarms, order goods from Amazon and play music and radio. And you can do all this with the power of your voice. You never have to touch the Echo Show’s screen if you don’t want to.
“Video call quality is good, both on-screen and from the Show’s camera, and I experienced no lag across my network or on a mobile”
But having the touchscreen there does add a little extra. By default, it’s set to display news headlines on a series of cards. It shows upcoming calendar entries and reminders, too, alongside suggestions of the things you can ask Alexa. Weather, sports results and various other queries generate a graphical info card, just like on Amazon Fire tablets; radio stations and music streaming are accompanied by currently playing cards with album cover and play/ pause/skip/shuffle controls; it’s even possible to watch Prime Video and, of course, buy stuff on Amazon.
The Show’s party trick, however, is its ability to make video calls. This works either from Show to Alexa-connected phones (and vice versa) or from Echo Show to Echo Show, and it works beautifully. Call quality is good whether you’re the one making the call or on the other side, and I experienced no lag when calling across my home network and on a mobile signal.
That’s not the case with the Echo Show’s other video-related feature: the ability to call up the stream for your home-security cameras. Say, “Alexa, show my front door camera” and the Show can patch in the stream for that camera without you having to leave the sofa. However, when I tested it with an Arlo Q camera, there was a six-second delay on the stream.