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Usually Amazon Echo products are a smash hit. So when the company’s newest device is earning only three star reviews… What's going on?

If you ask me, people don’t know what to make of the new Echo Hub, and may not understand its place in the larger Alexa ecosystem. This is not simply a new smart home speaker, it's something else. In this review I'll dig in on what makes Echo Hub different from my hands-on personal experience, who it's actually geared for, what it's best for and not as good at. I'll wrap things up by going over the pros and the cons and letting you know if I think I can recommend this home hub to you.

What is Echo Hub?

As Amazon tells it, the Echo Hub is an “easy-to-use Alexa-enabled control panel for your smart home devices”, but that doesn't help us very much since it sounds a lot like every other Alexa speaker device with screen.

You could say that while many Echo devices are speaker-first, the 8-inch Echo Hub is smart home-first. It integrates with all of Amazon and Ring’s smart home devices like alarm systems, cameras, thermostats, smart locks, and lighting, and gives you a central place to manage control of all of them a little easier than on a typical Echo screen device.

Some of the key innovations here are that it’s flat, and designed to be wall mounted (though a $30 stand is available) and you can more easily customize the controls and widgets displayed on the screen, and adjust which devices you see, or which cameras you can pull up quickly.

This small flat panel also uses presence sensing, which Amazon calls ‘adaptive content’ to detect when someone is nearby so the screen will switch automatically from a clock or photo display to the customizable smart home control screen.

In my opinion, I would say this device is designed to be your smart home at a glance. Whereas other Alexa devices like the Echo Show 15 or Echo Show 10 are designed to be more information focussed and will display things like news, weather, interesting stories, jokes, or other Alexa how to information, the default viewing on Echo Hub’s screen is your smart home and its gadgets.

Power options (& battery life)

If you choose to wall mount this device you will still need to manage the cable. Amazon recommends mounting it near a plug, but right out of the gate I think I would find that a little messy. You can get a wall rated conduit to hide the power cable inside your wall, but this is a little more trouble than I think it's worth.

Another option is to use the Power over Ethernet option with a compatible USB-C converter. I opted to use the counter stand and simply have it plugged into the wall.

What can Echo Hub do?

After spending several weeks with this device in my home, I’d say Amazon Echo Hub has four key features.

1. Smart Home security hub

Anyone who had a home alarm system more than 10 years ago likely remembers you needed a hard-wired central panel to arm and disarm the alarm. It looks like we're back to the future with this concept meant to be placed in a central location in your home.

Echo Hub is an ideal alarm system control panel. I have had a Ring Alarm system for many years, and one of the things I was looking forward to doing with this, is setting up my Ring Alarm 2 system.

I connected my Echo Hub with the Ring Alarm 2 (and you can see the full review of that here). When I call up the alarm system I can see at a glance if my home is disarmed or armed.

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