Amazon Echo Hub review: 5 things I learned after spending a month with this smart-home manager
It puts all your smart-home devices at your fingertips — but fails to compete with a cheaper, better Amazon product.
Imagine if Amazon shaved the screen off an Echo Show 8 smart display and reworked the user interface to be entirely smart home-focused. That's the Echo Hub in a nutshell: a wall-mountable control panel for managing your connected devices. But, hang on, can't you do that with voice commands to Alexa? Or use an actual Echo Show and also enjoy the benefits of its big speaker? Those were just a few of the questions I had when I installed the Echo Hub. The answers are ... complicated. Here's what I've learned after living with the device for over a month.
VERDICT: Expensive, limited and not very user-friendly, the Echo Hub isn't something I'd buy. Unless you absolutely want a wall-mountable control panel, the Echo Show 8 is the smarter choice.
- Clear, printed setup instructions
- Wall-mountable
- Supports Matter, Thread, Sidewalk and Zigbee devices
- Less expensive than other smart-home hubs
- Ad-free (for now)
- User interface is confusing and buggy in places
- Weak speakers
- No camera
- Performs poorly as a digital picture frame
The Echo Hub has an 8-inch touchscreen, dual speakers, a pair of volume-control buttons and a "mute" button that disables the three built-in microphones. There's an ambient-light sensor that dims or brightens the screen as needed and a proximity sensor that activates the home page when you approach. (When there's no one near the Hub, it reverts to whatever "Idle Screen" setting you prefer: clock, clock and photography, clock and personal photos, etc.)
1. The biggest Echo Hub challenge is figuring out where to put it
The Hub looks like a chunky tablet, with a body that's a little over half an inch thick. Amazon supplies wall-mounting hardware, but keep in mind that because there's no battery, it needs to stay plugged in full-time. That means you're going to be staring at a power cord unless you drill holes to run it through the wall.
I really struggled with where to put the Hub. My initial thought was alongside my smart thermostat, which is in a highly trafficked area, but there wasn't an AC outlet anywhere near it. I considered the bedroom as well, except I'm rarely in there, and then it's mostly to sleep. You'd want something like this readily accessible.
That left the kitchen/dining area, but there really wasn't a suitable chunk of wall available. In the end, I decided to go with the optional Sanus Tilt Stand for Echo Hub, which allowed me to plunk it on the kitchen counter — or relocate it if I decided I didn't like it there.
The key takeaway here: Figure out where you want the Hub before you buy it. That power cord can be a decor-killer.
2. Setup is a breeze...
Kudos, Amazon, for including a printed instruction manual that not only identifies every part of the Echo Hub, but illustrates the wall-mounting process and runs you through the initial device-setup steps. It even lists a few things you can do with Alexa. So many tech products these days give you a QR code to scan and that's it; I'm glad to see an actual print booklet here.
Because I already own a variety of compatible devices — the Hub supports just about every smart-device platform, including Matter, Sidewalk, Thread and Zigbee — and have the Alexa app installed on my phone, Hub setup was easy. I just connected it to my Wi-Fi network, signed into my Amazon account and followed the few remaining steps from there.
By itself, the Hub adds little to your smart-home setup; its value lies in providing a focal point, a central location, for all those devices. Indeed, how much you'll be able to do with it depends in part on how many smart devices you have and, more to the point, whether they've already been linked to the Alexa app.
In my home, there are four cameras — two from Wyze, one from Amazon-owned Ring and one Wansview outdoor security cam — along with an Aqara U100 Smart Lock, an Ecobee smart thermostat, some Kasa smart plugs, various LED light strips and a bunch of "miscellaneous." (Alexa recognizes my Roku TVs, for example, though I never use voice commands for them.)
Because these had already been detected and/or configured in the Alexa app, they automatically appeared in various areas within the Echo Hub interface.
3. ...but operation can be confusing
That interface is ... not great. The bulk of the screen consists of a side-scrolling widget bar; mine was auto-populated with ones for cameras, weather, calendar, favorites and "Top Connections" (which simply lists various devices I have and strikes me as having little value). There's also a side-scrolling shortcuts bar along the bottom, allowing quick access to things like locks, lights and plugs.
Amazon offers a small gallery of additional widgets, including sticky notes, to-do list, ambient sounds, What to Watch and the like. But a lot of them are weirdly categorized — why is Space Cam located in the Smart Home category, for example? — and some don't work correctly. I tried the game Which Came First?, for example, and it locked up in the first round.
You can rearrange widgets, keeping in mind that only two, max, are fully visible at a time on the Home screen until you start scrolling. At that point, the side menu disappears and you can see as many as three at a time. Even then, the whole idea of scrolling to find a widget that provides information you can easily get elsewhere (or access from across the room with a voice command) seems kind of pointless.
I was especially vexed to discover that while I could reorder the shortcuts bar, I couldn't add or remove shortcuts. For example, I have a Dreo Smart Space Heater that would be nice to quickly toggle on or off, but the only way to access it from the shortcuts bar is to scroll over to Other, tap it, then scroll down to the second page of additional devices and find the shortcut there.
The cameras widget — ostensibly one of the Hub's most useful tools — caused me some frustration as well. For starters, on the Home screen it shows a live feed for only one of my four cameras: the Ring. The other three are just blank boxes. If I tap the widget, it opens a full-screen multi-view that eventually populates with four live feeds. But why can't it do that on the Home screen?
Meanwhile, multi-view doesn't show the same four cameras as the widget view; one of the spots is occupied by a fifth camera that's not only inactive, but actually toggled off in the settings. So instead of seeing the four feeds I actually want, I get three and a never-ending "loading" animation. I fiddled with settings for a long while and never could solve this issue.
The aforementioned side menu lists three options: Home, Routines and Add Groups. Although the Hub showed the Routines that I'd already configured in the Alexa app, none of my Groups appeared — and there are over half a dozen of them, again already configured in the app. (Even though the Hub interface says "Add Groups," it merely leads to a page of instructions; you can't actually add them on the device itself.)
Another bug: The Active Media button promises to display your "active streams," meaning any media playing on Alexa-connected devices. But when I listened to Spotify on my Sonos Move (which is indeed Alexa-connected), the Active Media screen stayed blank.
Another oddity: When you raise or lower the volume using the side buttons, it dims the screen for a few seconds, which makes zero sense.
One of my favorite things to do with a device like this is use it as a digital picture frame, running a personal-photos slideshow when it reverts to standby mode. The Hub offers this option, same as Amazon's Echo Show devices, but for some reason, many of my photos were stretched horizontally. (I have an Echo Show 5 performing the same slideshow task, but photos are formatted properly for the screen.) Meanwhile, my photos didn't cycle every 12 seconds even though I verified that setting in the Photo Frame app.
Needless to say, there are some decidedly buggy, poorly implemented areas of the Hub UI. Many of them could be corrected via software updates. If and when that happens, I'll update the review.
4. The Echo Hub is missing two things that would make it more useful
Although the Echo Hub has dual speakers, they're exactly what you'd expect from a glorified tablet: weak and tinny. Amazon makes no claim that this is intended for listening to music or watching videos (though it supports both), but if you're going to have something like this in, say, your kitchen, ideally it would have decent speakers. Obviously, the thinner, wall-friendly design makes that more challenging, but it also limits the usefulness of the device. (For what it's worth, you can pair it with a Bluetooth speaker if you want.)
In that same vein, the Hub has no camera, so it can't be used for things like video calls or home security. Again, it's not an Echo Show, it's a smart-home hub, so one could reasonably argue it doesn't need a camera. But why not include one anyway to give the device those added capabilities?
5. I don't get it
At the risk of sounding curmudgeonly, the Echo Hub needs to get off my lawn. I'm a little irritated by this device, which seems flawed at best and unnecessary at worst. Anything I want to control in my home, I can do with my voice. For example, it's easier to unlock my front door via voice command than touchscreen because the latter requires several taps followed by a numeric code. Plus, I have to actually walk over to the Hub first.
It may come as no surprise, then, that after a month with this, I found myself using it almost never. Granted, I don't rely on Alexa for things like my calendar or to-do list, so those widgets offer no value. I don't use it for calls or "Drop In," either, which is why no contacts appeared in my Top Connections widget. (Turns out that's for making voice calls to contacts or other Alexa devices, which again begs the question: Why no camera for video calls as well?)
At least the Hub doesn't (currently) shovel ads at you the way Echo Shows do. And there's no question it costs less than competing products like the Brilliant Control ($399).
So who is this thing for? I think there are two potential audiences:
Smart-home nerds (you know who you are) who want a full-time control panel for their devices.
Households where not everyone is super tech-savvy. My partner, for example, liked the Favorites widget because she could turn certain lights on or off with just one tap.
I could also see the value for babysitters or grandparents who don't know the intricacies of your smart home and need access to simple, visible controls.
For everyone else, I'd say don't bother. In fact, unless you specifically want a wall-mountable solution, I highly recommend choosing an Echo Show 8 instead. It has vastly superior speakers, a built-in camera, widgets that appear when you approach the screen and support for all the same smart-home platforms: Matter, Zigbee and so on. Plus, it's $30 cheaper.
Indeed, the Echo Show 8 already has some Hub-like features; it would be a simple matter for Amazon to add a full-on "Hub mode" that effectively replicates the Echo Hub interface (though hopefully with some necessary fixes and improvements). As it stands right now, the actual Hub isn't something I'd recommend for most buyers.
