Amazon’s Echo devices are widely accepted across the world due to their smart nature and most importantly, Alexa, which can handle your smart home appliances as well as answer most of your queries. The brand’s latest launch in India is the Amazon Echo Spot, priced at Rs 8,499, which stands out by being a smart Alarm Clock with Alexa, rather than being a smart speaker. Here’s our review of the device, which should help you decide whether to purchase it for your bedside table or not.
Amazon Echo Spot (2024): Design & Display
The Amazon Echo Spot gets a design similar to the Echo Dot but split in half with a slant. The front gets a semi-circle-shaped cutout with a glass covering and a small rectangular display, below which sits a speaker.
There are three mics on the top along with a mute button and volume up/down buttons on either side of it. The mute button, when pressed, shuts off the mics and the button turns red to indicate that Echo Spot is muted.
The device feels heavy in the hand and looks quite premium with the matte finish body and a mixture of glass and mesh on the front. The bottom side of the device is flat while at the rear, there’s a small port for power input.
The buttons have a tactile feel when pressed, and the overall form factor is compact, so it won’t take up too much space on the table. The wire on the back, though, might bother many as it’s cheap-looking and spoils the device’s premium look to some extent.
The front display is a 2.83” touch-screen LCD panel. When looking from the front, the screen blends in nicely with the black glass, but if it’s too bright or when looked at from a certain angle, the display cutout is visible.
However, an LCD panel is a better choice as the clock has to always stay ON, where the AMOLED Display could be an issue due to chances of burn-in. Because the device is always plugged in, the high battery-consumption characteristics of an LCD panel are nonexistent.
The display’s brightness is enough for the device’s primary use case location, indoors. Moreover, there’s support for auto-brightness so it can adjust automatically based on ambient lighting. The colours are handled decently and are quite vibrant. For its size, the panel is also sharp enough to display all the content clearly.
Because it is too small for a touch screen, touch targets could feel a little smaller, such as when pressing the pause and play buttons while playing music, but fortunately, the touch functionality is responsive.
The clock’s display is acceptable and usable without any issues for its purpose, but keep your expectations in check, as it’s nothing extraordinary.
Amazon Echo Spot (2024): Features and Performance
Speaking of the sound quality of the Amazon Echo Spot, the speaker can get pretty loud for its size. The sound does distort minorly at maximum volume but doesn’t break anywhere.
The bass is decent, but don’t expect it to be extraordinary like the Amazon Echo Dot. That is a dedicated speaker, while the Echo Spot serves as a smart clock. Even for that, the speaker sounds good, and you can easily listen to music on it for an enjoyable experience.
You could even tune the mids, highs, and bass through the Alexa App and it does make a difference to the sound signature if you tune it correctly.
The speed of Alexa’s responses is definitely better than that of my second-generation Amazon Echo smart speaker. When you activate Alexa through voice, a blue indicator is shown on the display.
It can also show you various graphics based on its responses, such as a sun or clouds if you ask it weather or some animals if you wish it Good Morning. There’s also an animation that plays across the screen when you play music which looks stylish.
Alexa’s performance remains phenomenal as usual where it understood most of my commands with ease, be it when I asked it to play a particular song, asking it about the weather, a general knowledge question, or commanded it control my smart home devices.
The mic sensitivity is high and it could even listen to my commands from across a room. The quality of the mics is also quite nice which I tested through the drop-in feature between my two Amazon Echo devices. My voice went through clear and crisp to the other end.
The new Amazon Echo Spot further supports functions like tap gestures so you can tap on the top of it to simply snooze an alarm. However, you cannot customise this function. Then there’s ultrasound motion detection support so it can detect when a person walks into the room and perform user-defined actions based on that.
Smart home control is also present for those devices that have Alexa support.
Through the Alexa app, you can perform various functions like changing the clock style, enabling night mode, Amazon Kids, changing the display brightness or enabling/disabling auto-brightness, changing the colour theme, restarting the device, changing Alexa’s voice, and more.