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.
No comments:
Write comments