Amazon’s Echo line
of smart speakers are great for listening to music, but they are also extremely
useful for controlling smart home gadgets with just your voice. So it’s no
surprise then that Amazon’s new Echo Plus leans into smart home control with
the ability to directly connect a variety of smart home gadgets. The Echo Plus
makes it very easy to get smart gadgets up and running in your home, which can
be a laborious process with other systems. Amazon has also added improved smart
home controls to its Alexa smartphone apps, which allow you to group devices
into rooms and run automated routines with them.
But while the Echo
Plus makes it very easy to get started with smart home gadgets, it stops far
short of what other, more mature systems allow. And while the Echo Plus can
connect to many ZigBee and Wi-Fi based products, it can’t work with any Z-Wave
devices, which are just as plentiful as ZigBee ones.
So if you’re
looking to dip your toe into the smart home world, and you want to use Alexa to
control it all, the new Echo Plus is a good place to start. But it’s not quite
enough to take you across the finish line.
As a hardware
device, the Echo Plus is almost visually indistinguishable from the first Echo
that Amazon debuted way back in 2014. It doesn’t have the more compact
dimensions or interchangeable covers of the new Echo also released this fall,
but sticks with the tall, slender cylindrical design that many have come to
associate with the Alexa virtual assistant.
The Plus does have
the ability to connect to other speakers via Bluetooth or a 3.5mm audio cable,
which the original model could not do. And Amazon has added Dolby Audio tuning
to enhance the sound quality, but to my ears it doesn’t sound any different
than before. Lastly, the Echo Plus is available in a dark silver color in
addition to the white and black options. Frankly, the silver is the least
attractive option of the three.
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