The Brand NEW Echo Hub is a Game Changer.

the echo Hub is a new $180 smart home control panel from Amazon it has their voice assistant to speak commands to and to get information from plus it's a highly responsive 8 in touchscreen display there are speakers for music video and other content microphones for the voice assistant and a few sensors on board too there are controls on the side plus controls for the rest of your smart home on the main screen and I'll tell you those smart home controls are in some cases exactly what you've been after the single tap option to get four cameras up on screen is a huge feature the touch control for your ring security system right on this main page makes it a security panel when compared to the echo shows the echo Hub has way better controls for your smart home and those those smart home controls show the very beginning of control working when the internet is down this is all on top of Amazon weirdly and wonderfully allowing us to customize a lot on this main page it allows you to get what's important to you and your family front and center and you can move just about everything on that page you can add in additional widgets plus remove ones that you don't want and with all that said it's pretty clear to me that Amazon has listened to some of the biggest requests that you as smart home people have been asking for today when I walk up to this screen it quickly shifts over to exactly what I've configured and it doesn't show me ads like some of these it's just a calm quiet display and if you've been using Echo shows for a while you know that hasn't always been the case I've had the echo hub for just over a week now but it's already my preferred option when it comes to Smart displays from Amazon so today not only am I going to introduce you to this new Echo Hub which I am so excited to do but I'm going to dive in deep and explain where and when you will still want to pick up an Echo [Music] Show hello automats thanks for tuning in again I'm Brian from automate your life my goal is to save you time and money on your journey to live smarter if you like that idea hit that subscribe button now in this video specifically I'm really going to focus on saving you money by helping you pick the best smart display for your home and to do that I need to introduce you to our new smart friend the echo Hub is an 8 in smart display it has two top firing speakers for playing music video and for making voice calls it also has four microphones with three on the front and a single one on the back now that lets Amazon's Voice Assistant hear you from all over your room and to respond with relatively accurate responses now studies from the last few years tell us that the responses will come back right 90 to 95% of the time as long as it's a request The Voice Assistant can handle the 8in display gives Amazon's Voice Assistant the ability to put some responses on the screen visually and Amazon even has some accessibility options for putting things like Clos captions on it however the resolution for this isn't exactly mindblowing and you shouldn't expect this to be like a tablet for consuming content especially since there's no battery it's not really built to play multimedia as the speakers are fairly small plus with a highly reflective screen that sometimes catches the lighting around your room there are a few control buttons on the side which allow you to turn on and off the microphone and also to adjust the volume in the back is a really smart system for mounting the echo Hub there's a cable wrap plus some grooves to insert your wall mount or the Tilt Mount you see me using in most of today's video for power am Amon surprised all of us with a USBC Port what's surprising about that it's actually capable of power over ethernet which means not only can you power your Echo Hub with an ethernet cable but you can also bring it wired connectivity instead of using Wi-Fi to connect the echo Hub to your network and the Internet it's a major Improvement when we're talking about a smart home hub as wired connectivity will really help Rel reliability you will have to think about placement before running out and purchasing this power over ethernet does provide some options for inall powering and even the USBC Port does but otherwise you'll have a power cable running out the bottom to an outlet you do get everything you need to mount this on the wall inside of the Box there's a couple of screws and included anchor mounts plus a guide that makes sure you're drilling into the right places there's also a good length power cable and an adapter and everything is pretty much in that toned down white color now one thing I had personally hoped for was that if I was putting this on the wall I could flip the display and it would reorient itself but that doesn't seem possible today I hope this is something Amon ads through software because if this was under a cabinet like I put it it would be nice to come out the top with that cable so we never see it of course for many of you like me who are renting or don't want to put something on your wall the Tilt Mount option is really great it has an extra cable wrap on the inside of that mount and it looks very similar to an Echo Show 8 when you get it on there now most people will use Wi-Fi to connect this to their home network and a lot of people will use the Bluetooth option to play music or other content from their phone but I'm a smart home guy and I find those Wi-Fi and Bluetooth radios to be more exciting for other reasons Amazon has created a true smart home hub but there's some caveats that come with that the list of Hub aspects are impressive as there's a zigg hub a matter controller and even a thread border router Bluetooth can be used with Smart Home Products too and Amazon has their own proprietary sidewalk Network that can reach up to a/4 mile out of your home these are all direct connections to the hub or at least they're effectively that any other products you connect to Amazon are usually done through Wi-Fi or another Hub you have in your home and so Amazon's Hub isn't acting as the Hub in those cases but when I talk about the actual Hub aspects of this there's just not a lot of different products that you can use there are a few Bluetooth devices that directly connect in fact the Bluetooth bulb I've used is the only one I've ever tried and it's just one of a few there are so few sidewalk products outside of the Ring system and the rest of Amazon's products now sidewalk provides that internet connectivity when yours goes out but otherwise it's just a few trackers as products matter is still relatively new and there aren't that many devices or even device types that you can use with Amazon today so that has to expand before that part of this Hub becomes important now it is expanding fairly quickly and Amazon definitely has improved their experience with matter as everything I did with this Hub worked really well but even when we talk about zigby which has been around for a very long time and there are literally thousands of zigby products available today there just aren't a lot of device types that you can connect to Amazon's zigby hubs it's most lights smart plugs and a few sensors there's a few other things but it's not really an extensive library of zigby devices that can be connected directly to this Echo Hub so suffice it to say that the Hub component of Amazon's offering is still pretty weak if you're looking for more than smart lighting or smart plugs now on the flip side there are two absolutely remarkable things about this Echo Hub when it comes to Smart Home control the first is that local control was finally possible with the echo Hub I turned off the internet in my home and my Bluetooth bulb stayed connected and was controllable through it all even better was the fact I could navigate through the display to get to that bulb and to control it it's an absolute first for Amazon even if it won't be all that useful for all of you today and secondly when you look at Amazon's overall options for connecting to Smart Home Products the number is greater than 140,000 Smart Home Products that's a few now you'll see as we go through the actual display and how it works that not everything is perfect when it comes to Smart Home control but this is a lot better than I think any of us have experienced on Echo shows in the past now as I stand a little far away from the Hub what you might be noticing is that it's not displaying any of those ads ads that we saw on Echo shows in the past it's a very calm display and I love the new video backgrounds that are available but the echo Hub doesn't have a camera on it anywhere that's a big change versus the echo shows because you won't be able to make video calls those cameras also provided this option to start a routine or an automation when you walked in front of the display and the camera saw you it was fairly slow to respond though and I never found it to be a very useful feature so what Amazon did with the echo Hub responds a lot faster as you walk up you'll notice that the screen instantly shifts to that main page that's based on an infrared sensor much like current motion sensors it also has a light sensor on it which helps to guide the brightness of the screen although you can override that with settings so now that we're here let's look at the main display just like the echo shows you can pull down to get to the menu this is a quick way to get to everything from communication music video and even routines the settings are here too and while you can also use the missa app for all of this it's pretty convenient and easy to use it here I did find it really interesting that the display and brightness slider had this cool and warm feature that's not something seen show up on other displays from Amazon so there are a few new settings and uh for example you're going to be able to work with the infrared or proximity detection settings to adjust those one of the best settings is right here Auto Wake when in night mode now in the menu is a home button that can bring you back to the main page you can always ask Amazon's Voice Assistant to send you to that homepage too so miss a go home on the left hand side is a menu That's based on the groups that you've set up in Amazon's miss a app they mimic those exactly and when you update them in the application they instantly update here every time you tap on one of these you get to control the devices that are in that group this gives you quick access to different parts of your home and you could manage the different Echo hubs around your home to have different groups at the top inside of each group Amazon's done a pretty good job of combining things like your lights together so you can turn them all off at once you can see them going off in here and they've done a pretty good job of giving you some extra controls for your smart home uh versus other Echo shows this is something that doesn't show up on the other models some of my devices have modes associated with them so here's an air purifier with fan speeds and then I also get modes available to me cameras give you a snapshot some of the time uh and you'll be able to tap into them to get the live view in most of the cases you also get microphone buttons so you can speak through your cameras if that's available on your camera and you can go back to The multiv View I showed you at the start of today's video but it's not all perfect so today you'll see a number of devices that don't have controls on them at all they don't show many sensors if that's what this actually is and just so you know I was able to get control of some of these but they weren't showing up right in these group windows so that's the big difference sometimes you can find the controls working in this other section or in these other groups at the bottom I also have some goie lights that are not showing up I don't really know why especially when other lights are here and working just fine and the really funny thing is I can still control them all through the groupings so they just don't show up properly right now and there's no real explanation for that now back to the main page along the bottom are these different types of things that you can control with the echo Hub if any media is playing in your home you can tap on that and it will bring up an interface here to control that media even better though is when you get a ring security system because this security panel shows up and you can arm you can enter your code to disarm your system But please understand that I did have have to get the ring subscription in order to have this actually show up and be able to control my ring security system without that subscription this just doesn't show up all of the other options along the bottom of this panel are the different types of smart home devices you'll have the categories will only show up once you have that type of device in your home but again this gives you another way of grouping or getting to groups of devices in your home for management and a pretty serious Improvement in this section is that you can scroll down when you have large numbers of devices and the load times are not long sometimes I'll experience a little bit of delay here just to be able to pull down the next page but this is the best experience for controlling a lot of Smart Home Products at the same time with Amazon it's better than the app it's better than the other Echo shows the device also updates really quickly and there are even buttons like these that turn on or off an entire set or entire type of device so be careful with those now above all of this are widgets you can move left or right to get to additional widgets that you put on the homepage each widget has its own potential configuration and a number of these are tied to skills that inside of the Amazon application so while these are the same widgets that show up on EOS show models 8 in and above I did find some discrepancies for the widgets available on this device versus uh some of the ones that were available on the echo shows so there are a few that are unique to this and the best example of that is the camera's widget now each widget has its own little controls and this camera one takes you to your full list of cameras if you tap on the word and then again you can scroll down you tap on the four squares to get to that four camera interface and within that you can actually double tap on any of the cameras to get into the full interface for that one but one of the best parts of this whole thing is that you can modify this main page if you place your finger on the screen for a few seconds you'll bring up a configuration and rearranging modes so rearranging is usually just holding on something and dragging it it could be a little bit sluggish but you're not going to do this a ton of times so it's not a big deal that it's a little slower than other things and then if you want to confirm something or a number of moves you hit that little check mark heading into to the configuration side of things gives us a few more options you can hide groups so if we didn't want to see the outside group I can just hit that or I can add it back in you can see that really we're not able to do much with the groups at the bottom those are kind of static but again with widgets we have some configuration options sometimes they have a little gear icon and for example the cameras here here you can pick the order of those and you can also enable and disable so if you want to see the cameras on other things you can hit that done button and now I have six cameras on my main screen that I can tap into quickly I would say overall this display is snappier than Echo shows smart home control is actually usable here and I would tell you in a lot of cases that the echo shows smart home control has become relatively unusable this is something I will find myself going back to and actually found myself building my groups in the app to make sure that I had good navigation on this display but let's jump into that comparison piece this is where we'll start to talk a little bit about the echo shows and some of the details and features that might make a big difference to what you purchase here's how I would break down the Echo Show lineup today the speakers they get bigger and better as you get more expensive with the Echo Show 15 being an exception it's important to note how strong the audio is that comes out of these speakers and while the loudness might seem to be very close it actually depends on where you are in the room for how this will sound and how strong the speaker will be I'll give you a couple of examples earlier versions of the echo o 5 pushed sound out of the bottom now they've rearranged it and a lot of it comes out the top the Echo Show 8 pushes a lot of the sound out of the sides and the Echo Show 10 is fairly well-rounded but wherever the screen is facing tends to block the sound quite a bit so just think about where you're going to set these in your room and what surfaces you can use to reflect the sound to the right spots for your listening from the screen perspective from the screen perspective it's obvious you're getting bigger displays based on the name but the resolution doesn't necessarily expand as fast as the size of the screen so your pixels per inch are a better indicator of how each display will look to you on that note pixels per inch is better on the lower end of these and so you'll find a little more sharpness in images on the smaller displays processing power changes a little bit as you go through these but from a general perspective only the Echo Show 5 really falls off on performance for me as the rest of these can navigate fairly well through their different screens the capability of Amazon's Voice Assistant changes very little and in fact 99% of you it won't be different at all no matter which of these Echo shows you buy if you're doing a lot of video calling this might be a big deal to you but remember you can only video call between other Amazon Echo shows and people with the Amazon app on their phone it's not a big deal in most cases cuz you're often really close to these displays otherwise other than a couple of specialized features Amazon has produced just different size displays with a slightly different footprint to fit the different parts of your home obviously the Echo Show has that special spinning feature but I think that's due for a refresh and I expect a new version of that if not this year than the next the rotation feature is also lessened by the success of the latest camera in the Echo Show 8 now to me the fact that this camera zooms and pans just a little bit as you move around the room almost makes it as effective as the Echo Show 10 and with a much smaller footprint now the echos show 15 has the ability to be mounted on the wall as well as put on a stand a lot like the echo Hub it can also be mounted horizontally or vertically and the other big difference with that is that it's intended to be a Fire TV device you can now use a remote with it and it also keeps widgets front and center on the display when you're not using it as a Fire TV with the general stuff understood let me go through quickly with what I think each one of these would be best used for the Echo Show 5 is truly a bedside alarm clock and a smart home controller by voice does really well in that situation the Echo Show 8 is your general purpose multimedia playing device if you want music you want audio books this is the right thing for your dollar and truthfully it's the right one 90% of the time as far as I'm concerned the Echo Show 10 as I said it's a little old now and I'm not sure that this design survives and continues if it does that's great cuz I do think it brings something really really unique to the kitchen it's obviously a bigger screen and so it does provide some interesting multimedia consumption opportunities as well as video calling and the Echo Show 15 is built as a dashboard but for your family if you're heavy into using features like the calendar that's where you're going to want to look if you want a video player then get a Fire TV remote and attach it to that and then go through all the different Fire TV content that you have today on bigger screens but if you want to control your smart home the best experience is on the echo hub for me it's going to be my go-to recommendation for a lot of you I think that it balances things very well and I don't care much about the speakers personally if I happen to have an Echo Show 8 an echo Studio or an echo fourth generation anywhere nearby then I have the Music Experience I'm after and I like that I can default the music playing onto those devices and then still manage it from the echo Hub so there you have it guys check out the links below for all the different products you saw in today's video they all have their purpose and I think all of them have come a long ways in the last couple of years otherwise if you're looking for a guide on how to use and set up this Echo Hub we're producing one of our detailed guides for setting up and configuring this smart home panel it'll be available on screen up there now if you're looking for more details and a deeper comparison of the echo shows then you can check out our most recent comparison video there check those out otherwise thanks for watching today and of course live smart

Channel: Automate Your Life

Views: 38,525

Keywords: Amazon echo hub review, echo hub review, echo hub 8, echo hub 8 smart home control panel, echo hub vs echo show, amazon echo hub, smart home, smart display, echo show, smart hub, control panel, alexa home automation, amazon alexa, smart home automation, local control, power over ethernet, home automation, echo hub hands on, echo show vs echo hub, echo hub vs echo show 15, amazon echo hub zigbee, alexa, echo show 8, echo hub, smart home hub, automate your life

Id: S4xKJk0heNM

Length: 25min 13sec (1513 seconds)

Published: Wed Feb 21 2024