Amazon Echo Show 15
The Show 15 doesn’t quite fulfil its potential, but it’s a fine addition to a smart home if you accept its limitations
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PRICE £200 (£240 inc VAT) from amazon.co.uk
What a brilliant idea the Echo Show 15 is. Where the previous Echo Show devices have been tabletop affairs, the Show 15 is at its best hanging on a wall – next to the fridge, perhaps, as Amazon hopes it will become the fulcrum of family life. You can buy the optional stand (£35) and sit it on your desk like a traditional Echo Show, but that feels like a waste of its talents.
So, where to put it? Amazon’s advice is to keep the Show 15 at eye level. It comes with a “mounting template” (a posh word for a piece of paper with the Show’s outline on it) and, once you work out your preferred area, you drill holes and mount it. All the wall plugs and screws come provided.
When it comes to software setup, the only variation from the usual Echo routine is that you’re asked which images you’d like to display, with choices such as an Amazon photo album, abstract shapes and “art”. Aside from entering your Amazon account details and Wi-Fi password, that’s it; the Echo Show 15 will download an update (around ten minutes in my case) and then await your instructions.
You’ve been framed
This gives you time to admire the Echo Show 15’s design. It’s essentially a picture frame that’s been pumped with steroids, with inch-thick white surrounds and a chunky frame. But where there would normally be a print, this frame contains a 15.6in touch-sensitive panel.
The Show 15 measures 35mm from back to front, with a bevelled edge that holds speakers on the left and right side (or top and bottom if you mount it vertically). That means it juts out from the wall a good inch further than any picture frames it may sit near, and unless you have a whitepainted wall you’ll also notice the thin cable that connects to a plug.
Amazon sensibly provides a cutout in the frame so you can curl away any excess cable, but most people will face the opposite problem. At 1.5m long, you may need to run an unsightly extension plug to the nearest socket.
Picture not perfect
There are a couple of other problems for anyone intending to use the Echo Show as a faux picture frame, which is that Amazon is still stuck in its “digital photo display” thinking. Cycling through a new image every few seconds is fine for photos, but it’s annoying if you want to admire a piece of art or show a static image. You can say “Alexa, pause”, but that only holds the image in place for around 30 seconds.
The single hack I could think of was to instruct the Echo Show to display an album that only contains one photo, but this is hardly ideal. Of course, Amazon may introduce static images with a software update, but there’s no guarantee of this.
What happens if you simply leave the Echo be? It will cycle through available images but overlay the time, date and temperature. This is standard behaviour for Echo Shows, but it’s a shame Amazon hasn’t had a more radical overhaul.
It has made efforts to take advantage of the larger display, however, wiitthh with its selection of widgets on the homescreen being the most obvious. Now, don’t get excited. At the time of writing, a paltry 12 widgets were on offer, and most are dull: a shopping list, to-do list, sticky notes, Cookpad’s recipe of the day, the Amazon calendar. The latter is the most useful, and unlike most of the widgets can be resized from small to large so that it fills the top section of the display. Widgets definitely have potential, but right now they’re underwhelming in both number and utility.
Touch and go
“If you’ve resisted smarthome technology before, the Echo Show 15 may inspire you to kit out your home or office”
Naturally, you can control most aspects of the Echo Show by voice. It had no problem hearing my commands; the big issue is whether it correctly interprets them. There’s a good reason that people prefer Google Assistant over Alexa, as it remains better at understanding people’s meaning. Alexa is perfect if you hit its keywords spot on, but it doesn’t take much to make her say, “Sorry, I don’t understand”.
That’s why I often defaulted to the touchscreen controls instead, which are organised in logical fashion. This is essentially a Fire OS device, so a heavily skewed version of Android, and there isn’t much room for customisation. That means you will soon either find the setting you want or, more likely, discover it doesn’t exist. For example, you may search fruitlessly for a way to add third-party video services, but only Prime Video and Netflix are currently on offer. YouTube results will also be displayed after a search, but selecting them loads the Silk web browser rather than its own app. Likewise BBC
iPlayer. Both played fine, but when I tried to watch an Australian Open match via my Discovery+ account, I was met with a “Mobile Guard: Android” error and (unlike on normal Android devices) there was no way around this.
Video star?
Admittedly, the Echo Show wouldn’t be my top choice for TV viewing anyway. It faces a couple of key challenges, one of which is the glossy finish to the screen; I couldn’t see any sign that Amazon has applied an anti-glare finish to alleviate this. The second is that the panel itself is basic. It covers only 55% of the sRGB gamut and 40% of DCI-P3, while its colour accuracy is poor with an average Delta E of 5.06. High-quality panels will have an average Delta E of less than 1.
There are two figures to cling onto, however, and those are its peak brightness of 439cd/m2 and a fine contrast ratio of 1,973:1. It still isn’t a screen I’d choose to watch Blade Runner on, but it’s more than good enough for viewing cooking videos, football highlights and the latest news.
It’s easy to be critical of the Echo Show 15’s audio output as well, but I was pleasantly surprised by what Amazon has achieved. The speakers are at their most effective when they have a wall to bounce against, but even in the stand they produce room-filling sound. Don’t expect hi-fidelity audio to match the best Echo speakers; instead, think of it as a way to listen to music in the background while preparing dinner.
I also found it a pleasant way to enjoy Audible audiobooks, while the integration with Spotify is excellent. Once your account is linked, it will prioritise your Spotify playlists over Amazon Music, for instance. The full-screen Spotify app is also useful, with details of what’s playing, cover art and other listening suggestions. Compare that to the BBC Sounds app, which shows a station logo and tells you what programme you’re listening to. It doesn’t even reveal the name of tracks playing on BBC 6 Music.
Extra talents
The Echo Show 15 has many more talents than video and audio playback. There’s a 5-megapixel camera for making video calls (complete with a shutter, naturally, and you can switch the microphones off too), but it’s limited to other people with Echo
Show devices or those willing to load up the Alexa app.
There’s much stronger integration with third-party smart home devices, making this an excellent hub to view camera feeds, activate lights and even control your heating and robot vacuum cleaner. If you’ve resisted smart-home technology before, the Echo Show 15 may even inspire you to kit out your home or office.
Amazon is also pushing the idea of a shared family calendar, with the ability to aggregate a bunch of individual calendars into one homogenised view. So, you can ask Alexa what’s on for your family today, or view everyone’s upcoming appointments in the calendar widget. You can also ask family members to sign up to Amazon’s face-recognition technology, after which it will recognise who’s looking at it and adjust what they see. Sensibly, Amazon has anticipated that this will include children and can ensure “ageappropriate content” appears on the screen when it recognises your kids.
Faltering start
As you can tell, this isn’t the defining product of the century. There are too many areas where it needs to improve, from third-party apps and the choice of widgets to the screen quality.
Should you buy this first iteration? That’s a more difficult call, because I’m certain that version two will be much improved. However, even with the Echo Show 15’s limitations, it’s an interesting addition to a busy family home. TIM DANTON
SPECIFICATIONS
15.6in, 1,920 x 1,080 touchscreen dual 1.6in stereo speakers 5MP camera Wi-Fi 5 Bluetooth (A2DP and AVRCP) 402 x 35 x 252mm (WDH) 2.2kg 1yr limited warranty