As a long time Alexa user myself, I have been trying out other devices such as Google Home and Siri, but always come back to using my Echo. The latest Echo Device, the Show 5 is an interesting new smart speaker, featuring a vibrant display.

Echo 5 Review

If you already are familiar with Alexa, this speaker will be right at home. You can ask Alexa questions, set timers, check the weather and listen to your favourite radio stations or streaming service.

With the additional screen, I feel like Amazon has refined the Echo Speaker just that bit more by providing a more contextual experience and more depth.

The 5 Inch touchscreen allows you to always keep track of your upcoming events, for example, I linked my Google Calendar to the Alexa app, and can now simply glance at my Echo Show 5 to see what’s coming up for today.

Also, smart home control has been improved greatly. When asking Alexa to turn on the light, you get a lovely compact dashboard where you can fine tune the brightness of all lights, set individual colours and so much more.

Design

The Show 5 comes in two very nice colours, a minimal white and black enclosure to match the surroundings of your home. It blends in very well to the surroundings and doesn’t draw too much attention. A great detail I really enjoy is that the screen dims to very low brightness during the night.

It’s not all perfect

There are some downsides to the Echo Show 5 too. In my house I use the Echo Speaker and really enjoy the sound quality of the speakers, but sadly this has to be one of the biggest downsides of the Show 5: sound is very bass heavy, lacking mids and sounds overall very muffled. If you are going to use this to listen to music, I would highly recommend that you connect external speakers to it, using the 3.5″ headphone jack at the back of the Show 5.

Conclusion

Overall, in the past weeks of testing the Echo Show 5 I have been overwhelmingly surprised with how well it performs. The addition of a screen makes the Echo Show compared to the speaker-only devices have a huge advantage, being able to show much more information at a glance while providing quick responses. One of my favourite features are the cards on the home screen, showing me quick details on the weather, what’s coming next on my calendar, the time and when someone is at the front door by using the Ring Skill.

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