hello I am wanderer001 and this is my review of the Eco flex I will admit this is the first
time in a long time that I spontaneously bought something that I was not sure I actually needed
but again around Christmas of last year the Eco flex first came out and the echo flex was on sale
so I jumped on it without really knowing how good it would be or what I would actually do with it
however I will admit the echo flex itself fills a very niche use case not everybody's gonna find a
usefulness for that use case but I will give you examples of what I have tested and see where it
fit in in my already fairly vast Eco compatible devices list over there if you're wondering just
how many I have around my house so to start you are looking at a device that it 2.8 inches tall
with a length of 2.6 and has a depth of 1.5 so it does stick out from the wall a bit once it's
plugged in however if you've seen some of the solutions to have your echo dots attached to
your wall outlet it's not that much difference I will admit the big thing that drew me to the
echo flex was the fact that it had an integrated power supply instead of having a cord that you had
to worry about managing speaking of the device itself we'll take a look around up front here
you have your two microphones you have your LED indicator which will be blue when you talk to
the device off when it's not being talked to and red when you have it muted speaking of muting this
button down here will mute the device Amazon still does not have a vocal command to mute your echo
devices I don't know why but they don't here you have the actuation button so if you don't want to
say she-who-shall-not-be-named you can press the button and down here you have your speakers I will
admit the speakers are serviceable for the use cases that I've found for this the entire device
itself is made up of this matte plastic finish so it's not going to show fingerprints so that's one
less thing you have to worry about on the right hand side there is a 3.5 millimeter port so you
can actually plug in a better speaker into this if you so chose coming down to the bottom this
is where the Eco flex gets interesting this is a USB port which can output up to 7.5 watts of power
and there are third-party there are third-party products which you can connect to the Eco flex
itself one being a motion sensor and one being a nightlight myself as I said this was a impulse
buy so I did not get the attachments however the port here can be used to charge your phone
or other devices so in my case I wanted to see what kind of amperage and voltage I could get
out of here when charging my pixel 2 so here we have an example of what the voltage looks
like when I just had my meter plugged into it and here we could see what the power output was while
I was charging my pixel 2 you can see the volt drops down to 4.6 - and the amperage is showing
1.2 - amps so not terrible you can charge devices using the echo flex now as I said I was not really
sure what I was going to do with this mainly because I had such a vast ecosystem already I
originally thought maybe I would put it in my bathroom maybe I would have it in my workshop
maybe I would have it in my garage all of them are good places for this likewise if you didn't
have something already in your kitchen this would be ideal for that because it doesn't take up any
counter space but if you already have an echo dot and it's wall-mounted something like this may not
work for you because the speakers themselves are not terribly great I will say Amazon has done a
great job of trimming down the actual set-up time needed for these types of devices and what do I
mean by that well let me show you what setup of Oh flex was like this is going to be set up of
Amazon echo flex here and to get around having an upside-down wall mount we're using the Belkin
power strip here so step one we're gonna take and plug this into the wall here and we're just going
to give that a second it does come with this little instruction manual with it because it's
it's very teeny tiny so once it's plugged in and flashing hopefully that's coming out on camera
hello your device is ready for setup just follow the instructions in your Alexa app
bringing your device online just a moment not entirely sure how well that came out over the
audio cuz I have a lapel mic on but now it's ready to be set up and it's telling us to go
into our okay that seems new I did not have to go into my she-who-shall-not-be-named app double
check here alright it says it's ready so let's actually give it a test Alexa weather canceled
so apparently if you already have Alex a account set up and you're the one who purchased this
set ups really easy you just plug it in and it connects to your network that was the shortest
echo setup I think I've ever done however for those that may still need to know how to set
this up from scratch I will link over there in the corner some of the other echo devices that
I've set up just so you know how to go through the actual app itself to do this but if you've got one
already it was literally I think it was three minutes and that was partially waiting for it
to boot up so as you saw setup was ridiculously easy I was surprised at how quickly it just
dropped jumped on my network and was ready to go the echo flex itself connects using 802 11 a B
G and n for 2.4 gigahertz or you can get up to AC for the 5 gigahertz I will say you probably don't
want to use the 5 gigahertz as you want this probably in the farthest reaches of your house
so you don't necessarily want faster speeds you want longer distance now I have referenced how
the speaker actually sounds well let me give you a demonstration of what an actual audio test from
this sounds like play royalty-free music shuffling songs by royalty-free music on Amazon music
Alexa next song I like so next song
alexxa next song
Alexa stop so hopefully that translates over microphone and video nicely you can tell if
you already have an echo dot or one of the larger echos you probably aren't looking at this you're
probably looking at this because you like me want to put this in another location that you
just can't readily get your other echo devices into that's where this fills in a need in that
you can use it for drop-in sessions or you can use it to actuate your home automation again full list
over there of home automation stuff that I've done it can be added also to groups if you have
a grouping for playing music however I would not recommend doing that and if you're looking for how
to do those groups again echo app over there in the corner I did find the mic itself was a little
hit or miss it does have Amazon's far-field communication in that when I was originally
testing it ISAT this in my dining room in between an echo device in my kitchen and an echo device
in my living room just to see who would pick me up and depending on where I was was which one did so
it does possess echos far-field communication now with any device one might wonder how much power
does it actually use because well if you've got a lot of smart home things eventually that does
start adding up so when the echo flex is idling it uses 1.6 watts of power when you are listening to
music at a 7 or 8 it uses 2.0 watts of power and then when the LEDs flash it uses 2.1 so that's
when it's connecting back to Amazon servers or if you have it muted and the LED is red and this
actually shows up red - that's 2.1 watts of power so again it's not a power-hungry device so the
question then becomes since I said I bought this on a whim how much does this cost well if it's
not on sale you can pick it up for $25 normally you'll find sales for 19 dollars I think I found
it on sale that time for $15 which is why I jumped on it realistically for myself because I have such
a echo rich environment I found myself actually you this between my garage and my workshop so
during the winter time this has been living inside in my workshop and only plugged in when I'm down
in my workshop so once I've done I take it out so it does fill a very specific niche will it fulfill
that for you only you know for yourself but if you're looking for a really cheap echo device to
add to your infrastructure or maybe you're just looking to see how good echo devices can be and
again I'm not getting into the nitty-gritty of what the brains of this do because I cover those
in my other echoed reviews over there and all of that lives on the cloud so it's constantly
getting better this is mainly just looking at the hardware so I have been wanderer001if you have any
questions or comments please leave them in the area below and as always thanks for watching