Amazon Echo Hub - Review 2024 - PCMag Middle East

At first look, it’s easy to write off the Amazon Echo Hub as a pricey smart display with mediocre audio. At $179.99, it's essentially a flat version of the Echo Show 8 ($149.99) with smaller speaker drivers and no camera. But with a sleek, wall-mountable design and a touch-optimized interface, the Echo Hub is specifically meant to serve as a smart home control panel. It's an excellent value compared with the similar Brilliant Control ($399), a dedicated smart home control panel that retails for more than twice as much. If you don't need a wall-mounted solution or easy touch controls, the Echo Show 8 is still our top pick for smart displays thanks to its superior media capabilities, but the Echo Hub stands out for its smart home prowess, especially if you prefer to control your devices from a screen rather than with your voice.

Measuring 5.4 by 7.9 by 0.6 inches (HWD), the Echo Hub is slimmer than any Echo smart display and is clearly designed to be mounted on a wall (a wall mount is included, while a compatible table stand is an optional purchase). The larger and more expensive Echo Show 15 ($279.99) is the only other wall-mountable Echo display, and it looks more like a framed picture.

The Echo Hub's 8-inch screen is framed by a narrow 0.5-inch white bezel on each side that sits flush with the screen itself. Three pinholes for the far-field microphones sit on the bottom bezel, and proximity and ambient light sensors are hidden at the top. The Hub’s speakers are also located on the top edge, while volume up/down and microphone mute buttons are on the right.

A recess on the back of the device holds a USB-C port for power, with rows of hooks for the included six-foot USB-C power cable to loop around to reduce slack if needed. A USB-C wall adapter is included for power, but the Echo Hub also supports power-over-Ethernet (PoE) with a compatible adapter (a Ring-branded adapter is available for $19.99) if you have your home wired for network connectivity.

Virtually all major smart home devices are covered by the Echo Hub thanks to its strong networking capabilities. It wirelessly connects to home networks through its dual-band 802.11ac Wi-Fi radio and can use Bluetooth for pairing with phones and speakers. In addition to the already massive compatibility list Alexa offers, the Echo Hub can control Matter, Thread, and Zigbee devices.

Setting up the Echo Hub is just like setting up an Echo Show. To start, plug it in and follow the instructions on the screen to connect it to your home network. Log into your Amazon account, then select your preferred smart display options, including photos for the display when it's sleeping. At this point, you can enable the Amazon Sidewalk network sharing feature (which we generally advise against, for privacy concerns). Finally, you need to download the Alexa mobile app (available for Android and iOS) and log in with your Amazon account to connect your smart home devices; the Hub can control them once they’re connected, but it cannot add new ones.

Unlike most other Echo devices, the Hub isn’t primarily designed for entertainment and communication. Its speakers are much smaller than the ones found in any Echo smart speaker or Echo Show smart display. Amazon doesn’t even specify the Hub's speaker size in its specs, as it does for nearly every other Echo home device. It also lacks a camera for video calling or home monitoring, a feature that is available on recent Echo Show devices. Instead, it focuses on serving the role its name implies, acting as smart home hub to control compatible devices. This is clear as soon as you approach the Hub and its proximity sensor automatically wakes the display, switching it from photo slideshow mode to the home screen.

When it wakes up, the Echo Hub displays a touch-friendly control panel with a list of rooms in your home on the left side of the screen and a status bar on the bottom showing smart home device groups and any media that is currently playing. The rest of the screen is taken up by the same large widget tiles on the Echo Show 8, 10, and 15. The widgets include Calendar, Shopping List, Sticky Notes, To-Do list, Top Contacts (for Drop In voice calls), and Weather. The home screen also features control panels for devices in the same room as the Hub, as well as your favorite smart home devices and a list of your security cameras.

You can load additional widgets onto the device, but the library offers an underwhelming selection of about two dozen options, most of which are ambient video and music apps and a few alternate weather services.

Tapping one of the rooms on the left side opens up a full control panel for all devices assigned to that room. Large tiles here let you toggle smart plugs, dim lights, adjust thermostats, and otherwise operate everything connected through Alexa except cameras, which stay in the status bar on the bottom.

The Hub makes it easy and intuitive to manage all of your smart home devices through its touch interface without talking to it, which is welcome, albeit counterintuitive to Alexa’s entire raison d’etre. Other Alexa-powered Echo devices focus on hands-free convenience (even Echo Show smart displays, which make it easy to play media and pull up information on the display by voice), but feature underwhelming touch controls.

The Echo Hub’s 8-inch, 1,280-by-800 screen can get bright and colorful if you manually max out the brightness, but by default it will stay at a modest but easily visible level that won’t draw attention as the most powerful light source in the room. After all, it’s a control panel more than anything else. It can cycle through your own photos or those of a few different art galleries when not in use, but that’s just for ambience.

A focus on smart home control doesn’t necessarily mean the Hub can’t be used for music, podcasts, and TV shows. Alexa will play audio and video content on request, and will bring up apps for Amazon Prime Video, Hulu, and Tubi that you can control on the Hub by touch. Netflix isn’t available as an app on the Hub, but you can access it and YouTube through the Silk web browser. The Echo Hub doesn’t have a home screen for audio apps, but you can ask Alexa to play music and podcasts from Amazon Music Unlimited and Prime Music, Audible, Pandora, Spotify, and several other services. Playback controls show up when music is playing and are otherwise accessible in the lower left corner of the home screen.

The Echo Hub's screen and software function just as capably for playing video as the Echo Show 8, but its slim design keeps it from working well for any serious media consumption compared with Echo speakers and Echo Show displays. I can easily hear Alexa through the tiny speakers, and at maximum volume, the virtual assistant sounds a bit louder than the level of a normal conversation. This means that listening to podcasts should be fine if you’re relatively close to the Hub.

Music, on the other hand, falls flat. Dynamic range is crushed, making Yes’ “Roundabout” lose any sort of low-end resonance or high-end crispness, with a high-mids-focused balance that borders on tinny. Our bass test track, The Knife’s “Silent Shout,” gets so much low-end-dampening digital signal processing that it sounds softer than Alexa speaking. Even the $40 Echo Pop sounds louder and better than the Echo Hub, since its deeper profile can accommodate a larger speaker driver.

Aside from its smart home control and media playback capabilities, the Echo Hub can do almost anything an Echo Show can. If asked, Alexa will bring up useful information like news reports, sports scores, and weather forecasts, and can manage reminders and shopping lists. You can make voice calls through a variety of services, including Amazon Drop In, Skype, and Zoom. It also lets you place standard phone calls to any non-emergency, service, or toll number in the US, Canada, or Mexico. Again, though, video calls aren’t supported due to the Hub’s lack of a camera.

To set up a new smart home device, tap the plus sign in the app, select the device type, then search for the brand. Certain brands and products, including TP-Link Kasa and Wyze smart light platforms, require separate configuration through their own app, but after that linking them to Alexa is painless. I had no difficulty adding my current Wyze Bulbs to Alexa simply by linking my Wyze account. I also added a Ring Stick-Up Cam Pro Battery and assigned all of my devices to their appropriate rooms without issue.

For controlling smart home devices, the Echo Hub mostly worked well in testing. In response to voice commands, Alexa adjusted my lights, both dimming and warming them without requiring me to use very specific language or to create routines. In the past, Google Assistant was better able to understand my natural-language requests compared with Alexa, but now Amazon's virtual assistant feels more natural to talk to.

Moreover, the Echo Hub offers a speedier response to my voice commands than Google Assistant-powered devices. It responds almost instantly, while both of my Google Assistant-equipped devices, a Lenovo Smart Clock Essential and a Hisense TV, take several seconds to process my requests. Given the significant improvement in Alexa reaction times, I find it slightly faster to use voice controls on the Echo Hub compared with touch controls. That said, the instant availability of smart home touch controls on the Echo Hub is highly convenient when I don’t want to use my voice. In comparison, the Google Nest Hub and the Echo Show both hide similar controls behind several swipes and taps on their screens.

It's worth noting that I hit a snag when accessing my Ring camera by voice. Despite being the only camera in my home, Alexa asked me to specify a room whenever I said, “Show me the Ring camera.” I had to say, “Alexa, show me the living room,” and even then it would occasionally not do it. The Hub didn't always reliably load the video feed, sometimes hanging on the connection screen until I backed out and tried to access it again. This problem could have been caused by Ring’s servers as much as the Hub itself, so I won't hold it against the Hub too much. When the video feed managed to successfully load, it looked clear and pinching to digitally zoom worked well, as did speaking through it using the Hub’s microphones.

If you look at the Echo Hub primarily as a control panel, it’s a great way for managing all of your smart home devices, and significantly more affordable than many competing products. If you look at it as a smart display, though, it's a bit overpriced compared with the Echo Show 8, which costs $30 less and has a camera and much better speakers. The Echo Show 8 also lets you use your voice to access all of the same compatible smart home devices, but it’s designed to emphasize media and communication over convenient touch-based controls. With that in mind, for $180 the Echo Hub is easy to recommend if you're looking for a slim, wall-mountable smart home controller with Alexa, but its audio and video playback features should be seen as secondary.