Amazon Echo Hub - Smart Home Dashboard | My Honest Opinion...

well the echo Hub the long anticipated device from Amazon at least for us smart home people is finally here now this is something that we have been waiting for for a long time a dedicated smart home dashboard I've been playing around with it all a day today and while it's cool it does have some bugs and drawbacks that's what we're going to be taking a look at in today's video so let's quickly take a look at this device and get it installed okay so here is the echo Hub we have got a small sensor right up here on the top no camera on this device a nice giant white bezel like we are used to seeing with most of the echo devices out there three microphones here on the front and then if we flip it over we have another microphone here on the back now we have got USBC which is pretty cool because this does support power over ethernet so if you do plug one of those adapters into here you can power this over ethernet which is pretty cool we got cable management inside here buttons over here on the side we've got a me button volume up and down and then we've got some top firing speakers here on the front all right now that we have seen what the actual Hardware is on this 8 in display let's go ahead and get it installed on the wall all right now even though I do have the stand for this device I know that wall mounting it is going to be kind of the ideal situation for most people so what I am going to do since I don't want to really drill into my wall since this is just a temporary area I'm just going to put double-sided sticky on the back of my mount and I kind of place it right here so I think this height looks good A little bit underneath my eyesight that looks level enough right I mean that's good enough it's just a temporary thing we'll stick it on there and the good thing about this Hub is that it's not very heavy so we're going to stick it on the wall and all I need to now do is line it up back here and now it's on the wall um the cool thing about that and the reason I put the double-sided sticky on the mount itself is because now I can remove this and move move it to a different location if I want to cuz I do have that stand but then the bracket is still stuck on here and it's nice and tight but let's go ahead and stick it back on here there we go cable coming down looks nice and pretty and watch don't you guys come in a little bit closer and let's take a look at what the operating system of this device actually functions like okay so now we have everything loaded up on the panel if you are new to the Amazon ecosystem everything that you're going to see on here was loaded within the Alexa app so I did everything on there first and that is populating what we're seeing on here today so do keep that in mind over here on the side we've got our home routines and then we have all the different rooms that I have set up if I want to go specifically to one room I can tap on that room and it'll bring up all of the devices in that room I can then slide over and individually control the different things so say for example I want to turn this light on I can tap on that light it's going to turn it on now we have the option here of adjusting all of our lights so we've got turn all lights off I can do that even though I have the one on but if I adjust the brightness on this right here it's going to do all of my office lights we can see the top office lights so when I adjust this down you're going to notice that my other lights are going to turn on too I'm going to go ahead and let's put that back up to 100% we're going to turn both of these lights off and then I'm going to click on the three little dots right here and that is going to bring us into the menu for that specific light now from here I can turn it on and off I can adjust the brightness and if I scroll down a little bit I can adjust the color too so we've got our shades of white right here and then we've also got our color option so from there I can select a very limited amount of colors for this light unfortunately no color wheel to select let's go ahead and back out of here and take a look at some of the other rooms in here so let's go ahead and go back to our home screen from here because I initially set up this device to be in the living room it's going to make the living room the primary one that is going to show up here so this is the living room I can adjust my thermostat right here I can tap on it to load it up and then from here I can adjust it up and down or turn on the fan for that now unfortunately from the panel here I cannot adjust whether it's heating or cooling I can do that through a voice command but I cannot do it directly from here and that's something that I hope changes but from here I can adjust the temperature on my nest in the living room it tells me what the current temperature is which is 75 and then the heat is set to 66 tapping out of there we can see a bunch of other different options we have got our cameras we'll take a look at that in a second we've got our weather setup right here favorites now this is something that I set up through the app so you can adjust your favorites if you do use something a lot and you want to have that maybe towards the beginning you can set up your favorites right there and then we've got a bunch of different widgets now if you want to adjust those widgets you can either tap and hold on any of the widgets which is going to bring up the ability to remove that widget gallery or rearrange the widget let's go ahead and click on the widget gallery and this is going to bring up all of the different widgets so we've got editorial new Smart Home music and audio we've got all of our categories and then from here we can add it so if you look up here there's a little plus sign that is going to allow us to add that widget or if it already has a plus sign like this one right here you can tap it to remove that widget so we're going to back out of here now for me here is something that needs a little work with the widgets I'm going to go ahead and click on rearrange the widgets it's going to have these three dashes in here over on the side and anything that could be moved around and from here you can move them so if I push and hold I can move that over here now it's a little buggy it's not very smooth I'm going to click on cameras and you can see it's kind of laggy it doesn't move very well everything kind of flashes but when we try to move some of the bigger stuff here uh let's see I want to move this one I'm going to push and hold and I'm just going to drag it over and I let go and it put it back to the end again so we're going to tap on here bring it over again let go did that work this time it's not there anymore okay it put it over here I I wanted it between these two but now put it over here so it's a little Cluny cluncky to re range the widgets on here I'm hoping this is something that improves with software updates down the road but I did want to bring that up we have also got configure so if I click on configure there's going to be certain widgets that we can configure one is going to be our cameras if I tap on the gear icon up here it's going to allow us to see different cameras and then place them in different orders so if I want my Spotlight Pro to be at the top I can do that we can also go down here and select which cameras we want it to show and which ones that we don't I've got a lot of cameras here from all the testing that I have done a lot of these aren't even plugged in right now but let's say I want my Spotlight Pro to be the first one I'm going to click done on here and now when I scroll over we see the spotlight Pro is set up as the first one now if you click on this four icon thing up here it is going to show you the four most recent cameras so the most recent cameras that saw activity that is what is going to be loaded up if you just click on the standard show me cameras button now you can also request to say show me backyard cameras or show me front yard cameras or whatever you want to do and it'll show those for you right there if you want to go in and see more of your cameras we can click on the actual camera button down below and we can scroll through our different cameras right here now if you want to get snapshots of these cameras we show you an example of that let's scroll up here so here we've got one for ring so we've got our ring cameras and from there it's going to S show us an actual snapshot of what it is this is going to be for compatible cameras only which as of right now is going to be ring because Amazon owns the ring brand and that is a compatibility through there you can then tap on that camera give it a few seconds here and that was pretty quick it loaded up a full screen we've got our microphone and we could also jump into multi view if we want to do that but now we can see what's going on over at our front door I got to say that is a nice clean image I'm actually pretty surprised at how well that looks so some other things that uh we can do here is that we can go through our different categories down below we've got lights we've got switches so for right here on lights I'm going to click on that and we see that I have got one light that is on right now and the rest of these are all off we've got the option right here of going all on or all off so I'm going to go ahead and tap on this it's going to turn all of my lights off so what you see we now have 17 lights off and if I tap here it is slowly going to start turning all of these lights on now there is a delay when I tap this if you notice we're still waiting here okay here we go lights are finally starting to turn on so little disappointed on the delay that is happening with all of these lights I wish it was a little bit more responsive and quick but unfortunately that is not the case right now I'm going to go ahead and tap on all lights off we'll get all of these lights turned off slowly going through getting everything turned off all right so those are our lightss right there but if anything that you want to use on here you're just going to tap on any of these categories down below to load those up now the cool thing with this device is that it does have a picture mode so when nobody's by it you can actually set up personal pictures or you can set up other categories like nature art whatever you want to select on there the cool thing is that it'll rotate through these and it stays as a picture frame as far as right now there are no ads being placed on it but who knows I could change down the road like with all the other Amazon Echo stuff but the cool thing is is that as I walk up to this thing when I get about 3T away it's automatically going to sense me from the sensor up here and it's going to jump right into where I last left off so now I can hop on here I can pick the room I want pick the setting that I want to do maybe turn lights on and off and I can jump right into there and that's pretty cool when I walk away after about a minute it'll jump back into the picture frame mode and I can enjoy looking at personal pictures instead of always looking at the dashboard okay so this product just came out yesterday and I know that there's got to be some bugs going on with it so I want to do a deeper more detailed dive on this thing in maybe about a month once some things have been cleaned up that's typically what happens when a lot of these new products first come out there's going to be problems with it when they first show up for me saw a lot of those where I'm trying to move things around or things are just accessing really slow and also I want to see if this thing gets more sluggish down the road because I've experienced that with a lot of my other Amazon products mainly My Fire TV that thing starts out super fast and snappy when I first get it and then after some time it just really slows down that's what I'm worried about with this guy right here it is a little jittery and slow right now but as time goes on is it going to get worse that's something that we'll dive into in that other video now overall as a dashboard though it's pretty awesome it's way better than any other Amazon Echo Show that we're seeing out there those things are terrible to use I actually really never use them at all I use voice commands but to have something like this I like it I wish it was bigger though I wish that this was maybe a 10in or that maybe later down on the road we can bring software like this to the big Echo Show 15 I mean that would be my ideal situation but you know time will tell what will actually happen to it if you have any questions leave them in the comments below and I will try to answer those when I deep dive into this product talking about absolutely everything that you can do with this now if you are new to the Amazon ecosystem and are just getting your smart home built out maybe you want to know how to create some home automations I recommend checking out this video right here if this video was helpful give it a thumbs up let me know that you liked it as always don't forget to subscribe for more content like this and I'll see you guys in the next [Music] [Applause] video

Channel: Steve DOES

Views: 20,558

Keywords: echo hub, echo hub review, echo hub 2024, echo hub unboxing, alexa smart home, amazon smart home, smart home dashboard, best dashboard, alexa dashboard, amazon dashboard, smart home dashboard alexa, smart home, home automation, steve does, amazon alexa, amazon echo hub

Id: DS7XYmV6Jsk

Length: 12min 16sec (736 seconds)

Published: Fri Feb 23 2024