Key Takeaways
- The Amazon Echo Spot has a great design that fits any decor.
- The small, dark screen offers easy visibility.
- However, software issues hinder Night Mode, and other bugs dampen the experience.
On paper, the Amazon Echo Spot (2024) is a great smart speaker and clock. It’s inexpensive, looks great, and is incredibly easy to set up and use. However, the Echo Spot is held back by something that predates even the product itself—baffling software decisions that actively make it that much harder to use.
Amazon Echo Spot 2024
The 2024 Amazon Echo Spot is a versatile smart display with a 5.5-inch touchscreen, ideal for video calls, streaming, and controlling smart home devices. With Alexa built-in, enjoy hands-free voice commands, rich sound quality, and seamless integration with your daily routines.
- Great design that doesn’t clash with decor
- Vibrant screen with nice clock faces
- Touchscreen is great when you don’t want to speak to activate Alexa
- Software issues can brighten the screen at night
- Alexa Skills can be buggy
Price and Availability
The Amazon Echo Spot is $79.99 and comes in three colors: Ocean Blue, Glacier White, and Black. You can purchase the Echo Spot by itself or bundle it with a matching charging stand or a smart light bulb.
Sleek And a Perfect Addition to the Nightstand
Let me get this out of the way—I love how the Echo Spot looks. The smart speaker has a minimalist aesthetic that can blend into most environments but still stands out enough to make it easy to read the time. I reviewed the Ocean Blue colorway, and it fits perfectly with the decor of my bedroom, but the Black and Glacier White colorways are also great choices that won’t clash with anything.
The screen also looks great. Unlike Echo Show devices with bright displays, the small screen on the Echo Spot is on the darker side. This makes it so it doesn’t stand out as much, yet makes what is on the panel easy to read, such as the clock faces or other notifications.
See Everything You Need to See
The display was the main reason I started to prefer the Echo Spot to my Echo Dot. It was fantastic to see at a glance if I had the alarm on, if there was a notification, or just to note the weather. While I could verbally ask my Dot about any of these things, having it available on an easy-to-view screen was preferable—and it made it less likely that my neighbor thinks I’m losing it talking to an invisible ‘Alexa’ in my bedroom.
Better yet, the Echo Spot’s display is a touchscreen. If I needed to pause or play music, adjust an alarm, or something else, I could use the screen to navigate to it and change it right on the Spot. I didn’t need to navigate the Alexa app (which is sometimes confusing, depending on what you’re looking for) or try to talk to my Dot. I could accomplish it with just a few taps of the Echo Spot.
Even just having a visible clock was nice, as I don’t have a standalone timepiece in my bedroom. I didn’t need to blind myself with my phone or try to read my smartwatch in the middle of the night to figure out what time it was. The Echo Spot also implements a night mode that makes the screen much dimmer and changes the clock face to a darker red—unobtrusive but easy to read at night.
The feature is great in theory, but if you’re trying to use the Spot at night, the software issues become blindingly apparent.
Software Problems Ruin The Experience
I tested the Echo Spot in my bedroom because I wanted to use it as a smart alarm clock due to its features. When I purchased my Echo Dot, I did so almost exclusively to be a smart speaker I could play white noise and music while I slept—the other features, such as controlling my smart lights, were just a nice bonus. For me (and I imagine for many), the Echo Spot would be a smart speaker and alarm clock to help wake up in the mornings.
But when I tested the Echo Spot at night, there was one major problem. I use Alexa Skills (apps, but specifically for Amazon’s smart home devices) to play white noise at night, both to avoid having to connect to my phone with Bluetooth and to prevent clogging my Now Playing lists with sleep music.
However, if you use Skills while the Spot is in Night Mode, the smart speaker will refuse to return to Night Mode. Instead, it will show the media player menu, which is significantly brighter than the dark red text of the Night Mode clock face. You can navigate back to the clock face, but it will always return to the media controls menu.
This is bad enough if the bright light wakes you up if you’re a light sleeper. It didn’t wake me up at night, but the screen changing to media controls caused another problem—I couldn’t read the time from where the Spot was on my dresser. While the time is technically still visible, it isn’t easy to see. It ruined the one reason I’d use the Echo Spot over the screen-less Echo Dot in my bedroom.
The issue also persists if you play any music, whether it’s an Alexa Skill or not. This isn’t even an issue unique to the Echo Spot—it’s been reported as a problem with other Echo devices as far back as 2022. It’s baffling that a software issue like this has been present for so long with no real acknowledgment and puts a huge damper on what is otherwise a great piece of tech.
Should You Buy the Amazon Echo Spot (2024)?
It’s difficult to recommend the 2024 Echo Spot. While I love how the smart speaker looks, and the hardware is pretty great, the software really holds it back. That said, if you’re fine dealing with Amazon’s software quirks, this is a great, sleek-looking smart speaker worth the purchase.
Amazon Echo Spot 2024
The 2024 Amazon Echo Spot is a versatile smart display with a 5.5-inch touchscreen, ideal for video calls, streaming, and controlling smart home devices. With Alexa built-in, enjoy hands-free voice commands, rich sound quality, and seamless integration with your daily routines.
