Top critical review
2.0 out of 5 starsHorrendous first impression
Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on 29 December 2022
I bought this as a gift for my best friend his fiance. We were all excited to try it out. We setup the Amazon account for them and all and the first thing we wanted to ask Alexa is to play music for us. Her response was "Get a 30 day free trial ..." To which we were shocked. I paid 80 euros for this and the first thing we get is an ad. It would've made a lot more sense to give as an option of a platform we prefer, such as Spotify and so on. Even though I paid money, I felt like we were the product of Amazon and not a customer. This just tells how aggresive their campaign and for this reason I'm taking away a lot of stars.
Despite this, the sound quality is very good. It can play videos from YouTube but you need to open the browser "Silk". Unfortunately, you cannot voice control YouTube, you need to physically press the screen. I can understand that, Google and Amazon are competitors. Although there is a browser that works, it feels cheap and not very fast.
I was a bit disappointed because it does not have any battery. Amazon Echo 8 works only when it's plugged in. If you want to move it from one place to another, you'll need to think about the wires. I didn't take away any stars for this because it's my own fault for not reading the specifications propely. It was just a bummer because I meant for Echo to be in the kitchen but with a need for a wire, there's no great place to keep it.
It's nice that several people can use it. You can connect Echo to your phone via Bluetooth and play music from there. You can mess around with Alexa as well, she's pretty funny sometimes. The screen is large enough to enjoy any video, the touchscreen itself feels responsive for the most part. It's quite heavy but in a good way. When you take it, it doesn't feel like something cheap at all.
All in all, if it wasn't for their aggressive campaign to make us use only Amazon products, I would've given it 4 or 5 stars. It was just very hard to recover after the terrible first impression. Once we got over it, it's a pretty neat product. If someone would ask me if they should get this, I would say not from Amazon just out of spite. I would recommend something like this from a company, whose sole focus is to provide a great gadget rather than to shove in every product they have.
