Amazon Echo Hub: The smart panel of home

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Review of the Amazon Echo Hub: Alexa's reasonably priced smart-home interface.

The newest Alexa gadget from Amazon functions as a central location for controlling lights, doors, cameras, timers, and heating and feels like the final component needed to completely automate a home.

The Echo Hub is a low-cost alternative to a device that typically needs to be professionally installed, which can cost thousands of dollars, or a do-it-yourself project that requires a high level of skill. It comes ready to be the touchscreen controller for your smart home.

The £170 (€200/$180) Echo Hub, which can be wall-mounted or set on a stand, doubles as a clock and digital picture frame when not in use. Its 8-inch LCD screen can pull pictures from your Facebook or Amazon account or display a variety of stock photos.

      

It is loaded with buttons and widgets to control various household items when it is awake. While a row of buttons at the bottom provides easy access to categories of items, including security devices, cameras, thermostats, and lights, a list of rooms on the left allows you to see every device that is Alexa-connected.

It is possible to program and activate routines, like opening the curtains in the morning or lowering the lights in the evening. You can add widgets to your home screen that display the weather, a to-do list, and other small items, but I personally think a simpler home screen is preferable.

The cost and simplicity of setup of the new gadget are what set it apart. Up until now, installing a hub like this would have required a system from Control4 or another similar company, which would have cost thousands of dollars. Using a tablet for a do-it-yourself project is also feasible, but it has its own set of issues and is difficult to get to function as smoothly as the new Echo Hub.

The advertisements that have recently become common on Amazon's Echo Show smart displays are thankfully absent, though the company would not guarantee that this will remain the case in the future.

Replacing reliance on phone apps

 

   The Echo Hub is a good way to consolidate controls for several items in one location that is accessible by everyone in the house. The ability to quickly turn on groups of lights and view recent camera activity and heating temperature was especially appealing to me. It eliminated the need for inconsistent voice commands or different phone apps.

Swiping to other areas can be slow, especially when loading rooms with a lot of devices, but button taps are responsive. Despite having a tablet-like appearance, the Echo Hub is not as quick as one.

Starting with a widget panel for the room you place the Hub in, the home screen has a decent layout. There is a master light switch with a dimmer slider in every room, but the smart panel only displays seven other buttons, all of which are locked into alphabetical order. The remaining devices are concealed behind a "show all" button. There may be a lot more taps and swipes than you would like if you have numerous separate lights or other gadgets. Although it seems like an unnecessary hack, you can get around it by being creative with the names of groups of devices within rooms, like "A Kitchen Spotlights," so they appear higher up the alphabetical order.

Voice control is an option for switching between room panels, but it is not very reliable and often turns on a light instead. If your smart home devices aren't already configured with another hub or gateway, the Echo Hub's Zigbee, Thread, Matter, and Bluetooth capabilities allow it to connect to them directly. Although it comes with a standard USB-C power plug, for a more polished look, you can use an adapter to connect it to Power over Ethernet if your home networking is more sophisticated.

The Hub can perform most of the functions of a smart display, including playing music and video, in addition to managing your smart home. Although it has stereo speakers that shoot out of the top, the sound quality is more like that of a smartphone than a real speaker. This is okay for Alexa's voice, but I wouldn't want to spend a lot of time listening to music on it. The Hub can stream to a Bluetooth speaker or group with other Echo speakers to display convenient playback controls. I discovered that the Hub had a harder time hearing me over background noise than the comparable Echo Show, so I had to talk directly to it more frequently.

Sustainability

After the device is discontinued, the Echo Hub will continue to receive security updates for at least four years and is typically repairable. 27% of its materials are recycled. The business provides recycling and trade-in programs.

Price

The Amazon Echo Hub comes with a wall mount and costs £169.99 (€199.99/$179.99). The price of the stand is £29.99 ($29.99).

In contrast, the Google Nest Hub costs £90, the Echo Show 8 costs £150, the Echo Show 15 costs £280, and Brilliant's plug-in Smart Home Control costs $299 (US/Canada only).

Verdict

The Echo Hub will be the off-the-shelf smart home controller that many people have been searching for. It functions best with Amazon's own products, like Ring devices or Alexa speakers, and requires all of your smart home appliances to be linked to the Alexa ecosystem. However, compared to other options, it offers a more central location where everyone in your home can have control without needing specialized knowledge, relying on apps, or using erratic voice commands.

It has a lot of limitations and minor issues, like slow actions in some areas, fewer customization choices, and poorer speakers and microphones than the comparable Echo Show 8. Even though the Hub is less expensive than some rival smart home controllers, it is still too pricey to appeal to everyone, especially when compared to the comparable Echo Show.

Although the Hub isn't for everyone, it seems like the missing piece of Amazon's smart-home goals, which could help revive Alexa as a platform even if people aren't as interested in speaking to voice assistants anymore.

Pros: good, reasonably easy for beginners to use, supports a lot of smart devices, works well with Ring and Amazon devices, has presence detection without a camera, has a good photo-frame mode, Alexa, speakers, can be mounted on a wall or stand, has several power options, and is reasonably priced for a smart home controller.

Cons: pricey for an Amazon smart display, slow loading and scrolling, poorer speakers and microphones than the comparable Echo Show, few customization options, full Alexa platform adoption and Amazon account requirements, additional stand costs.

 

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