Spatial audio and a smart home hub help elevate the new Echo Show 8 above its predecessors, but it's a modest refresh.
Amazon Echo Show 8 MSRP $150.00 Score Details “The Echo Show 8 remains a compelling smart home hub, despite only modest upgrades for this generation.” Pros Cons Most people know Alexa from Amazon’s too-inexpensive-to-resist Echo Dot speakers, but the plucky virtual assistant also presides over an entire Echo empire. You can buy an Echo Auto for your car, an Echo Link for your home theater, and an Echo Pop for anywhere with an outlet.
But a few things have changed. The camera now lives in the center of the bezel instead of the corner, the speakers now deliver spatial audio, and it sports a built-in smart home hub. That means you can connect smart home devices powered by Zigbee, Matter, and Thread without purchasing standalone hubs for them.
After plugging it in with the included power adapter, it will ask for your Wi-Fi and Amazon credentials before walking you through some basic setup, like photographing your face from different angles to enable user recognition. You’ll get to make some fun customizations and you’ll roll your eyes through a gauntlet of Amazon nags .
Sound quality One of the biggest upgrades with the latest Echo Show 8 is support for spatial audio. While this surround technology is most closely associated with Dolby Atmos, that’s not what Amazon is using here. The Echo Show 8 remixes ordinary stereo tracks to mimic a surround effect, similar to the virtual spatialization in high-end headphones like the Bose QuietComfort Ultra.
Not all of this performance is new – we loved the sound in the last-generation Echo Show 8, too, which has the same driver setup. So while spatial audio is a nice perk, it’s not a prerequisite to rock out. With a screen that sharp, some users will naturally want to watch TV, and Amazon obliges with apps for Netflix, Hulu, and Amazon Prime Video. Due to a spat with Google, YouTube has no app, but the included Silk browser is an easy enough workaround to access it. Yes, there’s a browser on here, too. With an 8-inch screen, you probably won’t be too compelled to read the New York Times from bed, but it works in a bind for tasks like pulling up a recipe.
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