Echo Hub (Newest gen) | 8" smart home control panel | Compatible with thousands of devices, with Alexa+ Early Access

This is precisely what I was seeking: a dedicated smart screen specifically designed for home automation, rather than attempting to repurpose a tablet or another Echo device. With approximately 12 smart home devices integrated into my system, I utilize Home Assistant as my central hub. To optimize functionality, I don’t rely on the built-in Zigbee capabilities of the panel; instead, I selectively expose the devices I want it to access through Home Assistant. This level of control ensures that I can tailor the panel’s functionalities to my needs. The panel itself is a well-thought-out size—neither too large nor too small—allowing for easy placement in various locations around my home. One of the standout features is the ability to customize the menu extensively, which enhances usability. If you have a Ring home alarm, this device is particularly advantageous because it allows you to eliminate the need for a separate alarm pad; everything can be seamlessly managed through the smart screen. While I haven't yet explored direct integrations with the panel, features such as Matter support and Zigbee provide a solid foundation. These are emerging standards that suggest the device will be future-proof, allowing new users to embark on their home automation journeys with confidence. Simplicity is critical in home automation, and a reliable panel like this effectively resolves many challenges by providing immediate access to smart home integrations, making it easier than constantly reaching for your phone or relying on voice commands. There aren’t many alternatives available for a dedicated smart panel, and it genuinely feels like this product is a stellar addition to the Alexa ecosystem. Although a tablet could serve a similar function, this smart screen comes pre-configured for automation, significantly reducing setup time and complexity. Another practical feature is that the display activates automatically when someone approaches the panel. While I could tinker with setting up a tablet to achieve something somewhat similar, this device is ready to go out of the box. It also includes the option for wall mounting, which contributes to a sleek and modern aesthetic. I wholeheartedly recommend this product. Normally, I am quite discerning when it comes to tech, but I genuinely appreciate what Amazon has accomplished with this device. It’s a well-designed, straightforward product that is likely to meet the needs of both experienced users and those new to home automation alike.

Woks reasonably well.. has a few software glitches.. bit expensive at full price but I got it on an offer at £99

this was my second purchase of this and I plan to buy more as they are great for if your room is filled with smart devices they are super easy to set up and pair with the Alexa app and are great for what I use them for with my smart home linking Alexa and Govee the screen size is perfect for what it is used for and the quality of the product is amazing however the only bit that needs improving is the sound quality however this is a non issue to me as I set the preferred speaker to a better Alexa in the same room you also need a pretty good wife network for it to work its best when toggling other smart devices and make sure your other smart devices are compatible with the echo ecosystem as I use Govee witch is - the price is also great when on sale as you can pick it up for around £100

I'm updating my review on this as I may have been a bit harsh initially. Though its fair to say I have still returned it. I see reviews asking whats the problem it's just a control screen, what do you expect? Well, firstly that's not how it was marketed. A Home Hub, with lots of pre-hype about its capabilities over the preceeding months made most people expect more than just a 'control screen' but that's not my biggest problem with it anyway. I have owned (still own) multiple echo shows of multiple generations (many 5, 8, 15 shows and kids fire tablets, kindle readers etc). I am a massive adopter of the alexa home environment. And I have been an IT tech guy for decades professionally. This is the least responsive, most glitchy and barely useful device out of all the amazon devices I have owned. But that isn't my problem with it. Yes, it needs a major software overhaul to meet the promises they made. Yes it looks like they designed it in 2014. But it does fill a tiny gap in the echo market that will prove useful to some people ( myself included) one day. It is not easily customisable to fit individuals different set-ups. It is in fact very limited in that area, often filling the screen with 10% what you wanted and 90% what they think you want. For example, I want to turn my lights up and down using the on screen dimmer/slider. Great, it does that but.. I have 1 kitchen light fitting with 3 bulbs in it. It will display the kitchen light slider BUT fills the rest of the screen with 3 more boxes, kitchen light 1, 2 and 3. Pushing all my other items off the screen. I dont need each bulb listed separately in it's own control box when i have the light group as a whole already. But you can't change that. You are stuck with Kitchen Light, kitchen light 1, kitchen light 2, kitchen light 3. Thats the same for my living room lights. My dining room lights. Etc. 3 rooms light switches fill the device with a dozen unnecessary on/off buttons. Still, not why I returned this device. I could have waited til a software update to fix these issues. My biggest problem is that the device itself is less responsive, less useful (and obviously requiring large software improvements) than say, a kids 7" fire tablet. And I mean the kids tablet is massively more useful in many respects. You can get one for under £60. This 'hub' is £160+ This is the problem. Yeah, some people may be happy with how it works, I honestly think they will fix a lot of the software issues and improve the UI over time, but it is way above the price point it should be at for the functionality and performance it lacks. If you want this (and I really wanted this!) WAIT for a major software update / next generation release. And buy it in the Black Friday sale. You will probably be happy with it at that point. I may repurchase this in a generation or two, but as it stands use the money to get a decent show and use the phone App and voice to control your home. Side note: I traded in one of my other devices to get the 25% trade-in discount. They won't transfer that to another eligible show ( I was going to get another show 15 because its pretty awesome) and they will not return your traded-in device. Its in the small print apparently. Despite it literally being called a 'trade-in' on every page, the amazon customer service person insisted it was not a trade in but a promotional discount. Consider yourself warned.

I am a huge fan of Amazon's Alexa. I have echo devices in all the rooms in the house, I only watch TV via the Fire OS using a mix of fire sticks, cubes and OMNI TV's. I have smart heating and light switches throughout the house. It's safe to say that I am heavily invested in the Amazon's Alexa echo system so you can imagine that I have been eagerly awaiting this product. On paper it does everything I wanted it to... but... in reality it just misses the mark on so many levels. Straight out of the box I noticed Amazon missed a huge opportunity in the design. The back plate that you mount it too is about the right size to mount to a 1 gang cavity backbox. So I though perfect, this is great for cable management, but NO, the holes are 1cm wider than a backbox! 1cm! come on Amazon, what a missed opportunity. It would have been so simple to make it backbox compatible but you didn't. And this is the theme all the way through, there are missed opportunities which make you wonder what they were thinking. The OS allows climate control - and as I have mentioned we use Tado smart TRV's in every room. in fact one of the reasons I wanted this is so that my family can control the smart home features without me having to get my phone out and open up each individual app. But frustratingly you can only adjust the heating in a room if it is already on. So if you have a schedule - like me - and the heating is set to off in a particular room, you can't turn it on from the smart hub. This is maddening! You cant even boost heating for all rooms like you can in the APP. if there was a dedicated Tado widget perhaps it would be possible to do from that - but - as I discovered while trying to get around this blatantly obvious issue, there isn't one. In fact there are surprisingly few widgets available. When Apple launched the iPhone there were 500 Apps in the app store ready to go, I only have 5 available smart home widgets in addition to the 6 that are already displayed on the home screen! That is woefully low. There are aspects of the hub which work really well. Functionality is sleek and smooth for the things on offer, but at this price point, and from Amazon, I was expecting much more! It just doesn't seem polished, or tested. It almost seems like the people developing it don't actually use smart home products in their own homes so they were trying to guess what a user might want and missing what we actually need. The fact that you can view you home cameras on it is great, but why the doorbell camera doesn't popup when someone rings it is baffling! Why miss this. It's simple. doorbell rings, camera should popup - it does on my TV! Why wouldn't it on the home hub. Just another missed opportunity. Also, while talking about price point, while not a must it seems nuts that the system which allows you to interface with your home automation, doesn't have a battery of any kind but is plugged in at the wall. if your wife unplugs it to do the hoovering, there is no backup power. not even 10 minutes. Why? Amazons own fire tablet is £50 cheaper than the home hub, and google nest home hub is nearly half the price at just £89. There is serious competition out there and Amazon just seem to have been very lazy with this product. There is more that I could write but this is already a very long review, the general gist is that there were so many missed opportunities that make the home hub really disappointing. Conclusion: It's hard to be impressed with the Home hub when comparing it to what else is on the market. Amazon really need to pull their finger out and get some serious software updates and widget options to justify the high price point. It is a shame because I have really been looking forward to this device and I wanted to love it sadly I am left disappointed.

I have seen the early reviews from some buyers and don't understand what they were expecting. This is described as the Echo Hub, smart home control panel and that is exactly what it is. It isn't a singing dancing Echo Show 15 it is a control panel. It does exactly what you would want it to do. It enables easy access to your devices, your groups, your routines, multi-room music control and syncs amazingly if you have Ring cameras. The multi camera live view for us is amazing as we have 2 stick-up cams in our back garden covering different areas that we can now see at the same time when we want to keep an eye on our dogs. For our house I am the gadget mad person and love the Amazon devices. We have so many routines set up with lights, plugs, cameras etc and many different music groups for various occasions. For my husband, even though he uses everything he has never really utilised what we have and the Echo control panel is what I have been waiting for as this makes it so much easier for him to see groups, routines etc and understand exactly what we have and enables him easy access without having to go through various sections of the Alexa app. It does not have all the settings of the Alexa app but has screen access to everything you set up in the app, it's like a chapter page of a book with the Alexa app being the full chapter. If you are looking for another smart display for your home then this is probably not the device for you and you would be better with one of the other Echo Show devices which all do similar but are not focused just on your smart home devices. If like us you love the smart home set-up and have many devices (we have well over 120 devices) then this is a great addition to your smart home. No doubt over time it will also have many improvements as with all the Amazon devices that I have personally never been disappointed with. I will say again for everyone this is not a smart hub it is a smart home control panel. If you buy it knowing what you are buying then you will not regret it.

I've just brought the Echo hub on Thursday 22nd of February 2024. I really like it, it's slightly thicker than a tablet but not by much. I like the fact you can see live streams of four different cameras at once, I really do like the widgets, shows me my Hive Heating, all my lights, my robovac everything is easy to find. I like the display, I think this will work great in my Smart home. The more I use it the more I like it. The wake words you can have in the UK are Alexa, Echo, Computer Amazon and finally Ziggy, Ziggy is available on all Alexa Devices. I will update my review once I've had time to test it fully. I've just ordered the stand for it now, later on I might have it built into the wall. I already own one 10 inch Echo Show 3rd generation, four 8 Echo Show, 8 2nd gen, and one 8 inch Echo Show 1st generation and finally one Echo Flex. Please don't be put off with the bad reviews if you check they haven't even purchased this Echo Smart Hub. Why some say this isn't as quick as tablet for I don't know as this isn't a tablet and it's not meant to be. I really like the widgets, if you have a smart home I would recommend this to anyone, if you don't like it you can always send it back. Update. This is really great I can see four cameras at once I use it more than my Echo Show 10 3rd generation or my Echo Show 8 2nd generation, it dos everything and more, I have noe customised the bottom of the screen, and I also have a lovely background on with a full size clock with the day and date on. You can customise the wallpaper and the type of the clock you want. What I really like it so much quicker at showing me my ring doorbells, outside and my indoor cameras as well. Definitely worth buying if you have a smart home.

Personally I think this is kind of poor and not what I was hoping for so returned for a refund. The sad thing is, it looks and feels great, and in theory should have been great for what we wanted. What we have... We run a basic smart home with some lights on timer settings and adjustable brightness. Heating controlled by Tado and using Tado smart thermostats. Blink Doorbell & cameras Alexa speakers around the house, some linked as a sound system. What we want... A central 'hub' in the kitchen / dining room for us to, Easily turn on lights and adjust brightness. Turn on, adjust or 'Boost' the heating using the Tado app. View cameras easily and doorbell when activated. Fully control music being played in the house, to easily select artist, song, playlist etc. The issue... Its too limited and 'locked' to the smart hub feature, the screen was unresponsive at times, the software was slow and laggy. It would freeze and take a minute or two for it to fix itself, you would have to try things multiple times for it to work. Limited control of heating, could not be used the the Tado app, so couldn't just do a simple '30 minute boost' function, which is a setting we use a lot to just take the chill off. It recognised all our smart TRV,s but said they were all unresponsive for some reason. Could open cameras and view, but incredibly slow to load! Could not get doorbell to show on the screen if it was activated. Limited controls for music, it showed our spotify screen of recently listened etc, but you could not search for artists or songs. Overall verdict... The product really looks smart and would have been great on the wall if it did what we wanted. Needs to be able to integrate with smart apps better of have more linked features. Needs to be a lot smoother to run a smart home with faster software. We are going to use a 12inch tablet mounted on the wall instead, this will give us simple control, link automatically to the select few apps we need, be faster and have updates. Its a real shame as the Amazon Echo products are so easy to set up and link to the rest of your account. In a perfect world we would try the Amazon Echo Show 15, but cant justify the price in comparison the cost of a tablet.