Hey YouTube, I'm Tristan from
Smart Home Point. The Echo Show is my
favorite type of Echo device,
and it might sound a bit sad but the
reason for that - or one of the big
reasons for it -
is that you can visually see your
calendar entries really easily on the
Echo Show
via the screen, and you can also interact
with your calendar to look at a month by
month view, or day by day view,
using the touch screen as well. It's
really convenient for people like me
that actually like to track everything
on their calendar.
You know if I need to ring a company,
I'll put that in the calendar to make
sure I know to do that in a few days
time.
Equally if my wife asks me to hang
something on a wall, I'll put it down in the
calendar. I'll probably forget about it...
but at least it's in the calendar!
And it's nice to be able to see your
calendar entries really easily here.
So I wanted to do this video and just talk
through the different calendar features
available on all three of the Echo
devices: which is the Echo Show 5,
the Echo Show 8 and the full size Echo.
Let's take a look!
[me] "show my calendar".
[Alexa] "here are the calendar events".
Okay so I've put a few jokey - sort of -
calendar entries,
in but basically if we go into list mode -
I'll talk through three day in a second -
umm...
if you look, yeah that's the start of my
jokey calendar, so you can see in list
mode you can
literally cycle through and see all your
calendar events. So I've literally got
play Rocket League non-stop, um it
actually cuts things off, which is a
little bit annoying. The actual full
calendar name is "play Rocket League
non-stop", and then it says "[out of office]".
Unfortunately it doesn't show that which is
a little bit irritating, and literally
just cuts things off, even though there's
all this extra space.
At least it tells you the from and to
date and time for the calendar entries.
So you've got play Rocket League on the
stop keep doing it
keep doing it and then rage quit Rocket
League...
which I've done a bit too many times!
this is actually a reminder, it says
reminder in brackets. again it's cut
off, which is a bit irritating but at
least you can see the calendar entry
here.
I've then got 'reconsider my life', umm,
'create an amazing business' and then
later on in the week 'sell my business'...
I sell my new business... and retire and
then I go back to playing 'Rocket League
non-stop'!
Uhm, which is a bit of a habit to be
honest, as you can see, and then I rage
quit again.
There we are, and then later on in the week
my friend
Jeff just wanted me to give him some
business advice! So
I've just got it on my calendar to track
that as well.
As you can see, I'm currently in list
mode and although it cuts off the actual
name of things - which is a bit irritating -
this list mode works really well, as does
the home screen where it shows you your
upcoming events.
But what I'm not as much of a fan of is
in the 3 day mode.
It's... it can be a bit confusing at times
to actually manage because
you know sometimes your three-day mode
starts here (at midnight). If you've
actually got an event starting at
midnight, or an
all-day event like I do, so you've got
that and then it looks almost like you
don't have any events on your Friday and
Saturday,
even though when you scroll down you
actually do - it's just midday.
Or you might have an event later on. I
don't think I do... um,
but that's a bit of a flaw with the 3 day
view, because you don't easily see -
you know - you could easily miss an event,
and whilst this would be shown on your
home screen,
you might also miss that as well if
you've got a lot of different cards on
your home screen.
So that's a bit of a flaw. The next mode
is month and unlike a lot of phones,
which don't have a lot of space but
still manage to show you the actual
events that are there,
the Echo Shows calendar doesn't show you
anything within a month by month view.
All you've got are these little dots to show
you when you do have an event,
and then you need to click into it to
actually look at what your event is. Uhm,
but again you then have the same problem
where if you click in -
oh that didn't work too badly did it?!
That worked quite nicely!
But sometimes if you click in and then
start scrolling you again have this
problem that you're at
midday - or sorry - midnight, and then you
obviously miss your actual
event, so it's not ideal but obviously I
clicked in there and that worked quite
nicely because all my - sort of -
all my events were grouped together in
terms of time. But certainly if you had
all your events spread out
throughout the day, then this view isn't
really ideal and certainly the month
view as a whole
isn't great because it doesn't actually
give you even a preview of what
is happening on each [day]. I think it'd
be a lot nicer if it was like the
Android or the iPhone calendar that can
give you a bit of extra information even
on the month view
where space is obviously limited.
In terms of the individual events, you
can come along
and click into them as you've seen
earlier, and get more information.
It also shows different types of events.
So what I did when I'm setting up this
joke calendar
is 'play Rocket League non-stop' I think
was set to just an
out of office type event. 'Rage quit
Rocket League' I think was a reminder.
'Reconsider my life' was a task,
and then 'create an amazing business' was
an event. So even if you've got different
types of
calendar entries, your Echo Show device
will support them, which is good to know.
Equally you can select a calendar entry
and delete it real easily. "Are you sure
you want to delete this event?", and you
can just delete it
by clicking delete. Brilliant, the next
thing you can do is
add new counter entries. You can do this
in whatever way you usually do and it'll
obviously appear here,
or you can use your Echo device to do
that. Uhm, so let's look at that now.
[me] "add a new event for 3 p.m tomorrow".
[Alexa] "sure and what's the name of the event?"
[me] "do important stuff". [Alexa] "that's do
important stuff on Sunday the 6th of
September at 3 p.m,
right?". [me] "Yes". [Alexa] "okay
I've added that". There you are,
that's your event which you've added, and
obviously because it's linked to your
actual calendar -
you know - you'll see that on your
phone, you'll see it on your computer and
anywhere else you access
it as well. So it's really nice - it's a
nice feature -
and obviously it'll show you the event
you added and immediately you can see it
there,
and obviously [in] the list mode you can see
it there, in the 3 day mode
and you can see it. In the month by month
mode as well - even though obviously as I
mentioned
before it's a bit hard to actually see
stuff there but um -
yeah overall I quite like the calendar
entries and the calendar feature
of the Echo Show. It is a bit annoying -
you know - that the month view doesn't
show more, and that the three-day modes
isn't great when you've got different
times spread... different events spread out
throughout the day...
but overall it works very well, I feel.
My one annoyance is the fact that it
cuts off the name of a calendar
entry even though they've got all this
extra white space that's unused, so I
don't know why they're actually trimming
those
down. Okay so that wraps up today's
video.
I wanted to just walk through all the
calendar features that are available
on the Echo Show device because it has a
touch screen and it makes the calendar a
lot more accessible. I personally quite
find the functionality useful, even if
I find the implementation a little bit
buggy at times, but hopefully they'll
clean things up. But nonetheless I still
find it useful,
and I hope you found this video useful.
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Thank you!