Echo Plus with Zigbee and eclectic range or Echo gadgets give it the edge over Google and Apple
Remember the Amazon Fire Phone? It was a hot mess of an effort to enter the smartphone game, never to be repeated. But while Google is busy trying to unseat Apple and reclaim Android from Samsung and a cavalcade of Chinese upstarts, Amazon used its latest hardware unveiling to double down on its effort to own the smart home.
The strategy? Choice. Lots of it. Where Apple is content with its pricey HomePod and with Google expected to announce a Google Home Mini at its Pixel 2 launch next week, Amazon has stepped ahead by launching a device for every niche.
First there’s Echo Spot ($129.99, US-only for now), a diminutive blob with a 2.5-inch screen and a built-in camera. It’s perfect as a bedside clock and assistant, while the camera and built-in mics mean it could replace the traditional baby monitor.
The vanilla Amazon Echo (£89.99), meanwhile, is now a smaller, squatter and cheaper little thing with customisable fabric and wood covers to help it melt into your decor. It’s joined by Echo Connect (£TBC, coming 2018), a box that plugs into your landline so you can make and take calls with any Echo device in your home. This is another clever extension to make Alexa a more integral part of people's homes.
More puzzling are the Echo buttons, pictured below providing wholesome fun to some generic not-quite-millennials. They’re pitched as interactive accessories for playing trivia games with family and friends, though quite how anyone could enjoy this while sober is beyond me. Get those models some hard liquor, stat.
All these devices join the eclectic Amazon Echo line-up featuring the likes of the Amazon Echo Show (£199), a sort of tabletop tablet launched earlier this year, and the Echo Look camera, which lurks in your cupboard and takes photos of what you’re wearing... yes, really.
But the most interesting entrant is the new Echo Plus (£139). This silver cylinder adopts the design of the original Echo, but adds Zigbee integration. Zigbee, for the unconverted, is a low-power wireless standard used by a huge range of smart home products, the popular Philips Hue among them.
Zigbee turns the Echo Plus into a proper smart home hub, able to interact with a huge number of existing products. Early adopters will even get a Philips Hue bulb with their Echo Plus, which means you can setup a Hue lighting system without Philips’ own hub. Developers will need to do a little work to integrate with the Echo Plus, but the promise of a voice assistant with direct integration with existing gear is bound to attract smart home devotees.
Eclectic it may be, but Amazon’s commitment to the smart home puts Google and Apple in the shade. With Google’s fitful attention spread across multiple fronts and Apple focused more on wearables than its half-baked HomeKit ecosystem, Amazon is in pole position to make Alexa your home’s default digital assistant.
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