I didn’t say the echo plus worked well, I haven’t used one or even read up on it. But it is a thing that exists, an echo with an IOT hub integrated.
Samsung Smartthings does work well, as long as you don’t expect it to control Hue lights without a Phillips bridge. But that isn’t Samsung’s fault.
You don’t own one, and you haven’t read up on it, so how do you what it can do?
When I said I haven’t read up on something, I mean that I haven’t done extensive research. I am broadly familiar with what the product is supposed to do.
You guys are really confusing me. The Hue Bridge is really the only way to go if you have a bunch of Hue bulbs. The Hue functionality Amazon put into the new Plus is basically useless.
My entire point with the Amazon Echo Plus is it does not do enough, is not replacement enough, was not thought through enough to justify the price in crease because the functionality does not replace enough, and it can’t really function as a smart hub to control all your home automation.
Then stusser posts this:
Which is not true to anyone but… him.
The Echo Plus doesn’t go far enough and barely does more than what the original Echo does with just a few additions that, again, falls short.
No, you said it should be an echo plus a hub. I said yeah, that’s what the echo plus is. And it is, indeed, exactly that. I didn’t say it was a good one, you read that into my post. But I did not say it.
It doesn’t even support both Zigbee and Z-Wave, it’s half a smart-hub at most. Do you know how many other smarthubs only support one protocol? I’ll answer, the big ones support both. The entire point of a smarthub is to control everything, or almost everything, from one place, one central app, and it can’t even do that out the gate and that’s before you get into the intricacies. And then the App itself, this would be the Alexa App, even if it does support ta device, you will often find the that it’s missing a lot of the features, like you might have 6 or 7 features in the base application but Alexa can only control one.
It’s not just about good or bad, it’s functionally severely limited even when it does work. They market it as if you can replace your hubs, but you can’t. It doesn’t replace them, and I don’t mean sort of kind of, I mean by doing so you actually lose a good chunk of functionality in doing so… so you have to have the other hubs anyway which pretty much destroys the reason of even having the Plus.
My point had nothing to do with the Echo plus. I already had a Smartthings hub set up before I got an Echo. I purchased an Echo and they added hub integration to it. The integration has worked fine. That’s all that matters to me. Im sure the Echo plus needs work on its smart home integration but to be honest that’s not a problem I am concerned with and its something they will probably address with firmware updates down the road. With all of the different hubs and protocols, its got to be a challenge to set up a universal hub and get it to work for everybody. My set up works great and I have voice control over everything I have set up in my home automation. I havent messed with Hue, it seems kind of pricey. I can get comparable bulbs, both white and multi hue for substantially less than Phillips charges.
Well if you understand you still have to have your hubs and you are fine with the limitation, the Echo is probably fine and you can spend an extra 50 for the plus for very little return. the problem is, that’s not how Amazon markets it, like at all. So it’s being reviewed as a hub, like they advertise, but it’s not fully functional in that capacity.
Exactly. Their marketing related to the hub functionality is very misleading. In my case, it was simply impossible to set up the hub and connect to my bulbs using just the Echo Plus.
If they are advertising it as a fully functional hub then yes, you are absolutely correct. I havent paid much attention to the Echo Plus because I am perfectly happy with the set up I have. Honestly if the Echo Plus is as dysfunctional as you believe then I would think the smart way to go would be to buy a separate hub like smartthings or such and avoid the issues with the Plus, until they can refine its hub functionality. You can easily find most of these hubs for under $50 so I would agree that the Plus is not worth it.
I believe that they are, and I believe this device got hammered because of that by most of the tech based reviewers. They even use Phillips Hue as an example… which has known limitations. I don’t think individuals who pick up Hue and use only the Echo as their hub will get the real Hue experience… and they say right on there, no additional hub required.
It’s misleading, but if you go in with your eyes wide open. Some of the plus owners are first time Echo owners AND first time hub users. I wonder how many even realize they’re even hitting limitations. They might just say hey Alexa found my thermostat… awesome, I can turn my temp up and down but I don’t have access to these six other features I don’t know about that actual not alexa app would give me, or the real hub.
Amazon Fire TV Cube
The names are getting a little long.
Pre-ordered, should get it 6/21. I really want voice control on my shows and movies (without depending on a remote) and am in the market for a new media player anyway. $89 seems to make the early adoption risk worthwhile. I shall report back!
Now if they’d just throw in the ability to actually record shows, rather than relying on the Cloud to have what I want, I’d be on top of this.
Just noticed that multi-room music is unsupported, and I absolutely require it. I could leave two Echos in the living room and assign different wake words to them, I guess. Hrm.
Not at all, you’ve been able to do it since late last year. Create a group of echos and call it out. So if you add your living room and bathroom echos to the “life poop” group, you could say “Alexa, play Nickelback on life poop”.
Yes, I know, and I use the hell out of that feature. But the new Fire TV Cube doesn’t support it.
Fire TV Cube will support sleep timers later this year. Alexa Calling & Messaging, multi-room music, and Bluetooth connections to mobile phones are not currently supported on Fire TV Cube. (from the product page, “We want you to know” section)
My impression is that the speakers in the Cube are not really music worthy and meant more for the voice command replies. Its not really meant to replace an Echo, it seems.
That seems likely. Most shocking thing to me was just how far superior the speaker in the Google Home Mini was to the Echo Dot. It’s like night and day. I wouldn’t use a Home Mini as a primary music source, certainly, but it’s definitely not bad. The Echo Dot is awful.