All this and more
I bought and Echo Plus and Dot last month and have been pretty pleased with them. I wonder if the Echo Input will work with a PC, if it does, the PC which already is connected to a good set of speakers, can be turned into an extension of Alexa.
x8 New Echo entries.
This is known as over-branding, and it’s taught in just about any college level marketing class. It runs the danger of adding confusion to potential customers.
I wish them well.
There’s also this wall clock, which displays your Alexa timer statuses, which I admit I’m sorta interested in (also sync’s the time like an atomic clock would):
Yeah I had a coworker come up to me and ask, “Hey I know you have one, which Alexa do I get?”
Even I struggled to tell him which model he actually needed. That is not the fulfillment of the KISS principle by their product team.
It’s a lot of stuff.
I am slightly interested in the Echo input because I think that is the one that will work with my receiver set-up. They keep talking about speakers, but it’s the receiver that would be nice to have the Alexa work with. On the other hand, I question what the input is going to to be able to really do.
I am dreading the Christmas questions. They took a simple product line and blew it up.
Most of the new stuff seems to be aimed at potential new customers, or people like Nesrie who want a little more out of their audio setup. Regarding the Echo Link Amp and Echo Amp, they’re “amplifiers through and through. Both have Ethernet, coax, optical in, and multichannel capabilities, and the Amp has a built-in 60-watt dual-channel amplifier that links to an Echo (with left-right speaker binding post outputs to support wiring directly to passive and non-powered speakers).” I’m guessing, or at least hoping, they also support multi-room audio.
Personally, I don’t see much here that would improve anything in my home. The wall clock does look neat, though. I can see sticking one of those on my fridge or somewhere in the kitchen to extend the usefulness of my timers.
So the wall clock connects via bluetooth-- how long do those batteries last? A couple weeks?
Anyway, the answer as to which echo to buy for nearly everybody is “the new echo dot”. If you specifically want to listen to music on the thing, then get the full-size echo. Or if you can afford it, a Sonos One. As for the rest,
- Echo input, you save $15 but lose speaker capabilities. Nah.
- New echo plus, you get some home automation stuff but you probably won’t be satisfied with it and buy a smartthings anyway.
- Echo sub is a rather ridiculous product, but maybe it sounds great, so I’ll reserve judgement.
- Echo auto is an interesting product, but every phone has hey siri or hey google already.
- Echo show is too expensive, at that price you can almost buy an iPad.
- Microwave is a gimmick, but it may go somewhere if others integrate alexa into their products.
- Clock: batteries, man. Batteries.
- Echo link: Really quite expensive, trying to compete with Sonos which is vendor-agnostic.
- FireTV ReCast: Like a TabloTV, but limited to FireTV clients only. Pass.
- Smart Plug: Like any number of other smart plugs, but limited to Alexa only. Pass.
I can’t really disagree with any of that, stusser. As an existing customer, I sure wish they would work on their existing products and customer base a little more; all this new stuff is just them expanding into new territories. That and throwing stuff at the wall and seeing what sticks.
The wall clock needing batteries seems like a non-issue for me. I mean, wall clocks are almost always battery powered, right? Not having to plug it into a socket, at any rate, is a big plus for me.
I am concerned, though, about how well the wall clock would work when there’s another Echo device in the room. I have no plans to get rid of my Kitchen Echo, and if talking to the clock messes with the Echo in any way, the clock will be returned, stat.
Yes most wall clocks use batteries, but most of them don’t have to stay connected to bluetooth 24/7.
Note it does not have any microphones, it just displays your alexa timers.
Yeah, I can see how changing the batteries out might get old, if it’s frequent. Be great if they included some sort of auditory or visual indicator for when it gets low on power.
Well, I imagine you just notice the hands aren’t moving.
If they somehow manage to get a year of battery life and don’t require unusual batteries, the clock is actually a neat product just for the auto time-setting alone. But that’s my cutoff, it needs to last a year on AA or AAA batteries. No D-cells or whatever.
It’s small, more discrete and there is zero reason to have a speaker when you have a home theater set-up. It’s not really the money so much as I think I could just put dome double sided tape on that thing and stick it on the wall if I wanted to… very light. This looks a lot more ideal than yet another dot.
You might be surprised, actually. I have a Sonos Beam which has Alexa built-in, and I wish I had some way to set Alexa’s voice volume separately from the TV as she is often very soft and hard to hear.
I still have my Fire TV Cube which uses the sound bar from the TV when its own and is independent when the TV is off… also known as, too dang quite when the sound bar is off and too freaking loud when it’s on. It also pauses the TV every time I ask her something which is super annoying. I also have the echo dot, and even the the dot was on all the time the speaker wouldn’t register it’s own and turn itself off… so the dot doesn’t’ stay connected to that anymore. The home theater set-up really just needs an input speaker which the echo input should do exactly, and I am hoping any updates to that would be specific for that purpose and that purpose alone.
The wall clock doesn’t have Alexa built in, it connects to an existing Alexa device to display timers and other things running on it. As for battery life, isn’t bluetooth a very low energy connection? I can’t imagine they’d release a wall-hung device that lasts less than a couple months on 2-4 AA batteries.
I also assume it’s not polling the Alexa device 24/7. It probably refreshes every 20-30 seconds and it’s a quick burst.
Long for like consumer electronics, sure but for a clock? I mean for those who still use clocks based on battery power, you put them in maybe once a year if that. I have an outdoor clock. I like it was around 18 months or so… I would expect one that pings Bluetooth would be a lot worse than that.
For setting and changing timers in the kitchen, I would hope for a much faster refresh than 20-30 seconds, personally. Not that I set and change them that frequently on a regular basis, but occasionally I need to and I would expect the clock to keep up.
My guess is the clock will run for 3-6 months on some AAA or AAs. I could probably live with that.
6 months I could live with. Three months kind of suck, but… I think there is also a zero percent chance i would buy this. Alexa can already do times, so can my phone and kitchen timer. When I can get all my little echo devices to respond like a Borg cube, then maybe I would consider something lik ethis.
Exactly, and that’s why a separate dot is better. I might end up disabling Alexa on my Sonos Beam entirely. Waiting to see if they improve it when Google Assistant comes in eventually.