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After testing the most practical smart home appliance I’ve ever seen, I’m still in disbelief that Amazon produced it.
Amazon Echo hub
I, along with many other fans of smart homes, are sick of switching between hundreds of apps on our phones to operate the smart appliances in our houses. Although Matter’s introduction eases this inconvenience, the new smart home networking standard is still not widely enough supported to completely remove the problem.
Many of us are consequently left searching for smart displays that will provide us with instant access to operate our gadgets. While some tech-savvy people choose to utilize an old tablet that has been repurposed and hung on the wall as a smart home control center, others choose smart displays like the Google Nest Hub or Echo Show, which can be used as smart home controllers right out of the box.
The Echo Hub has a built-in smart home hub that supports various protocols, such as WiFi, Bluetooth, Zigbee, Sidewalk, Thread, and Matter.
However, there are always downsides to these gadgets. By becoming what these gadgets are not—a smart home controller and only a smart home controller—Amazon’s newest Echo Hub seeks to close a gap in the market.
The Amazon Echo Hub has no extra features. Apart from being a hub and controller for smart homes, it has no other primary functions, such as having a spatial audio speaker fixed to its base, streaming in ultra-high definition, or displaying advertisements while in sleep mode.
For my smart home, testing the Echo Hub over the past week has been a welcome change of pace. Its navigation is divided into widgets and categories. The Amazon Echo Hub shows your widgets on roughly two-thirds of the screen at a glance, with device categories at the bottom and your routines and rooms on the left. You can add new widgets that you download from a store, and you can alter the ones that already exist.
The 8-inch touchscreen display may be placed on a flat surface using a table-top stand that can be bought separately, or it can be wall-mounted, which is how I prefer to use a tablet that I’ve always intended to repurpose as a wall-mounted smart panel.
The Amazon Echo Hub is a smart home control panel that includes the Alexa voice assistant. It can also be used to link Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, Zigbee, Matter, Thread, and Sidewalk smart devices, as its name suggests.
However, why create the Echo Hub when Amazon already sells the Echo Show? Among the biggest and most user-friendly smart home automation systems out now is the Amazon Alexa smart home network, which is growing rapidly. With 100 million compatible devices, the system has the most devices.
With no effort on your part, the Alexa app connects and adds new devices to your smart home rapidly. It also allows you to operate devices from many manufacturers in one location. You can rely on technology to be simple to set up and operate with the Alexa app, voice assistant, and now the Amazon Echo Hub if a smart home device indicates it “works with Alexa.”
There is a lot of Alexa in my house right now—I have four additional Echo speakers and three Echo Shows. I purchased an Echo speaker as part of my Apple HomeKit setup to compare Alexa and Siri. I then acquired an Echo Show for my kitchen so I could control smart home devices and enjoy music or the news while I was making supper. However, I also got the show because I assumed the display would provide me with better visuals for my calendar and smart home, which turned out not to be the case. I appreciate that the Amazon Echo Hub fulfills its promise to provide me with a fast and easy way to operate my smart home and a clear view of it.
Amazon Echo Hub
Even as someone who uses the Echo Show daily, I’ve never kept quiet about its flaws. I don’t like that I can’t customize what shows on standby, that Alexa only understands me 80% of the time, that the hardware is sluggish and slow, that voice navigation is difficult for apps like YouTube (which requires a browser), and that smart home control is such a secondary feature.
I hate to admit it, but I use Alexa more frequently than my Apple Home app since it is multi-device capable, maintains a steady connection, and simplifies routines. With the Amazon Echo Hub, I can easily access all of that convenience on my wall. On my walk upstairs for the evening, I can quickly run routines from the hub, check my security cameras, arm and disarm my Ring alarm system, change the temperature downstairs, and turn on or off a light.
An additional feature that sets the Amazon Echo Hub apart from other Echo devices is that you may select which Echo device in your house to play music on when you ask Alexa to do so during setup. If you still want to play music, this method ensures that you don’t get an Amazon Echo Hub in place of an Echo speaker—especially if you want smart speakers throughout your house.
I am simply hesitant to fully surrender to Alexa and Amazon, like many other smart home users, because I am concerned about privacy and security, especially because data is not handled locally. Even while businesses frequently assert that protecting customer privacy is their top priority, you have to take them at face value when it comes to your data.
