the Echo Show 8 is the newest smart display from Amazon and the question
really is is this the right one for your smart home
hello Automators thanks for tuning in again I'm Brian from automate your life
and today I'm going to take the frustration out of automation by giving
you a full review of the Amazon Echo Show 8 but we're not just gonna review
this device in a bubble and I think you know on YouTube I see a lot of this go
on but we have to talk about where you will find value in this device
specifically and then where you might find value in other devices that are on
the smart display market today the Amazon Echo Show 8 actually has two two
inch speakers coming out of the side and kind of to the front here with the
device and it has a passive radiator out the back now there are a number of
controls that we'll talk about on top of this device but it also has a micro USB
port in the back for charging certain devices if you'd like now it is fully
Bluetooth capable and you can use that bluetooth feature without Wi-Fi which is
actually a big deal versus some of the competitors from Google side of things
now the other thing is it uses Wi-Fi to connect to the overall Amazon voice
assistant service and then give you all of the different capabilities and
features other than that bluetooth that Amazon gives you
now it has a 1280 by 800 resolution screen which is the same resolution as
the Amazon Echo Show second-generation so this is the 10.1 inch version but
with its 8 inch and that's measured diagonally form-factor here
what you actually have is a really high pixels per inch on a good size of
display here so that's a hundred ninety-five pixels per inch on the
Amazon Echo Show 8 we're gonna flip that on its head and I'm gonna talk about a
ton of new products that work with Amazon's voice assistant as well as a
number of new features for you thanks for tuning in again I'm Brian from
automate your life and today I'm going to take the frustration out of
automation by keeping you up to date with Amazon's voice assistant and their
entire suite of smart home products it's a hard thing to keep track of course
it's fully capable of answering all kinds of general inquiries and it plays
music and video from a number of different services it also does voice
and video calling and that's one of the points of the little video camera that
is on this device as well and by no means am I going to give you an
exhaustive list of its capabilities because I could go on forever but if
you're looking for some specific capability go ahead and leave that
comment down below in the comment section here on YouTube and I'll be
happy to give you an answer there as best I can
what I do want to tell you about that is a little bit specific to this device and
the Echo Show devices in general is the fact that it has two browsers on it now
that is the silk from Amazon themselves and the Firefox browser and both of
those are fully capable browsers that you will find very powerful and very
good to navigate but by no means should you expect the same level of experience
with those browsers as say a very powerful tablet in your smart home it
also of course has the full smart home control capability and that's something
that's very near and dear to our hearts here on automate your life but it it
doesn't have the ZigBee hub that the Echo Show second
generation has the Echo plus and now the the larger Echo studio there so you know
you don't have that ZigBee hub but it's not a big deal and we'll talk about that
more in detail later in terms of pricing and this is probably the most important
thing this is a $230 u.s. smart display and this is a regular $130 u.s. smart
display this comes in at $90 so you can see that you're only that $40.00 above
and we often see these go on sale now at $100 and on the big sale days at $80 and
I've even seen a two-for-one here so the pricing is really reasonable here and I
think it kind of pushes this one oh just for enthusiasts just for people who want
that big screen but it's close enough to this to kind of warrant upgrading
instead of going and buying the 5 you end up at the 8 this speaker is very
good and it has a better bang for the buck versus the Echo Show 2nd generation
over here it's definitely much better bang for the buck than the Echo Show 5
and when you go and you compare it the Google Nest hub max is two hundred and
thirty dollars again so it's kind of in this price range near $100 off of that
mark for that device now while that's a much better balanced speaker you know
when you come down to a device that's closer to this the Google Nest hub this
is definitely a superior speaker to that device so from an overall speaker
perspective while I find the overall range of Echo Show devices to be a
little bit heavy on the low end of frequency and a little bit muffled
sometimes this is a very capable speaker especially for the price point
if you do a very quick smart home control or smart home automation
comparison to any of the other Echo Show devices there's really just that tiny
bit of difference this doesn't have a ZigBee hub this does not have a ZigBee
hub either this does and what I'll tell you in general is that I would take the
hundred dollar differential between these two devices and go and spend that
on a different Smart Hub like a habitat or a Samsung smartthings hub you're just
going to get a lot more functionality for that ZigBee protocol and you're just
going to get a lot better automations overall Amazon's just not there in terms
of their overall automation capability it's still a very good automation
capability and is ahead of Google still because you can trigger off of certain
sensor types so you know I have a video here very recently about wise coming in
to Amazon's voice assistant and their sensors being able to trigger so those
are $6 sensors and you can bring those in that's through Wi-Fi essentially and
it allows you to trigger automation with just an Echo Show 8 in your home it's
display is bright and vivid and I think when I compare these three devices this
is the right size for most locations in your smart home and it also just has the
best pixels per inch of the three or it's very close to this and this is so
small you're not going to be able to see much but this is the right size and the
right brightness and the right display now it's not dethroning the Google Nest
Hub Max and I even in a lot of cases like the Google Nest hub
than any of Amazon's displays and that's a bit of the reflectivity of all of
these displays they are very shiny very reflective and so you actually have to
think about where your lighting is in your smart home where else it can be
very difficult to actually see parts of the screen and the other part of that is
the interface and I think this is really becoming a problem for Amazon's smart
displays the interface has really let me down and continues to be not nearly as
good as what Google has produced and Google still has lots of work people are
frustrated but in general I will say this is not as responsive as any of the
Google smart displays I have in my home I have a ton of different ones that I've
used and I have three in my home currently employed and just the
reactivity or or the quickness of reaction is much slower on any of
Amazon's devices and I just don't like the interface half as much especially
for controlling my smart home bringing up cameras those kinds of things it's
just more clicks it's more things to look at and it's a little tougher to
navigate and actually control things in a really intuitive way the video calling
on the Echo Show 8 I think is a major gap now one of the things I do like
about the camera is this physical closure and I think that is absolutely
critical for any of the smart displays in my home we have unproven privacy not
only just from a policy standpoint but even outside of policies people are just
not sure about these devices so it is really great to have this physical
switch but what happened here is they took the 1 megapixel camera that went
into this and put it in the Echo Show 8 instead of the 5 megapixel coming from
this device and coming into here now I imagine there would have been a small
price increase on something like that and I get that Amazon wanted to hit a
mark with our pricing which is great I applaud them for that but this is still
a major indicator to me that they're not moving further ahead with their photo
and video calling service he those two services clearly won't be
changing anytime soon won't be getting better and when you compare it to the
situation on a nest hub max with a nest camera on it and how different that
experience is is when the camera moves around the room for you there's a big
difference and unfortunately it really disappoints me that Amazon didn't move
that forward the processor here really hasn't gotten an upgrade and this is not
going to move the Echo Show 8 forward from any of these devices they really
haven't changed the processing power so it's the same thing here and it has
limited I think the visual interface and will limit it going forward so from an
overall perspective the Amazon Echo Show 8 to me is still the best smart display
here out of the 3 it's the best bang for the buck and it is the best overall
device but what I'm really kind of telling you guys is that they haven't
been really pushing the envelope here and none of these devices are any longer
in the tooth than the other ones like they're not going to last any longer
than the other so an Echo Show 8 that you buy today won't be any different I
think in terms of a lifespan than the Echo Show second generation and that's
because of the choices they've made with the hardware and their software needs a
pretty significant revamp in my estimation and some other youtubers like
Craig's Tech Talk really talked about this in his review of the Echo Show 8 he
did a great review of it and I think he was bang on when he said they really
need an interface update and I'm not sure how much of that interface update
they can do with the hardware on these devices so again still the best one
still the one I'm going to recommend to you but you need to look at that 1 to 2
year lifespan and maybe some other devices and on that note I have a ton of
reviews up on screen right now this is a playlist just for smart displays that we
have between Google and Amazon and any other makers that we've had on the
channel here so go ahead watch those you'll learn a lot and you'll make the
right choice for your smart home going forward otherwise guys thanks for
watching and of course don't hate automate