Review: Amazon Echo Hub

I've been testing and writing about smart displays since they first launched, a screen slapped onto the ever-growing world of smart speakers. Since the introduction of the massive Echo Show in 2017, Amazon's displays have consistently felt a little bulky and overstuffed, trying to be too many things at once, with design taking more of a backseat.

Amazon fixes that with the Echo Hub. Instead of a classic smart display with a large speaker, it's a wall-mounted display designed for controlling your smart home. The design is reminiscent of a home security system panel or a control panel for a custom smart-home system like Control4—but also looks unsurprisingly similar to an Echo Show, just without the speaker backing.

The speaker isn't the only feature chopped off from the Echo Hub. But the streamlined, simplified device feels like the smart display I actually want: easy to use and focused, with none of the cluttered slides or advertisements found on an Echo Show.

The Echo Hub displays a primary control dashboard most of the time. (There's a customizable clock face too, identical to the Echo Show, but it doesn't activate it often.) The dashboard has a little menu to the left to access your routines and individual rooms in your home that have smart devices, a bottom menu with icons for lights, cameras, and smart plugs, and the rest of the screen is taken up by various widgets.

Widgets are about the size of a small Post-It and show all kinds of things, including your calendar, the weather, smart-home devices, music, and news. By default, the Echo Hub included smart-home group widgets that showed the devices in my living room and baby's nursery. It then showed me the weather and my calendar that was already connected to the Alexa app. You can click on a widget to get more info about the room or topic (like a detailed weather report), and you can swipe to the left to find buttons to add more widgets or rearrange the order of the widgets you have selected.

Widgets are one of my favorite features of Echo Show devices, and I love that the Hub is entirely focused on them. My Echo Show 8 ($150) won't always show me my widgets, and the Echo Show 15 ($280) is great for widgets but too big to, well, put anywhere. But the Echo Show is a perfect little screen with my favorite widgets, the smart home controls I need, and no obstacles to get to them.

With the widgets and menus on the almost-always-live dashboard, it's easy to quickly control your home. There's plenty of info stuffed into the main homepage. While it's not exactly beautiful, it's easy on the eyes and simple to navigate, and it's easy to swipe through the smart-home devices that the Hub is connected to.

In the side menu, you can tap the Routines button to access the routines you've made in the Alexa app and activate them. You aren't able to edit or create new routines on this page, so you'll need the app handy if you want to make changes. Below that is the room list. My Echo Hub showed the Living Room, Office, and Nursery, since those are the three rooms I've created within the Alexa app.

There's a final bottom menu where you'll see entire categories of devices, such as lights, cameras, and plugs. You can tap these to see all the devices of that type at once; I see 10 different lights from my home when I open on the generic Lights option. But even without opening it, that little menu also shows me the total number of lights on in my home, so it's handy at a quick glance. Finally in the list of menus is the classic top-down menu that matches an Echo Show device. It's where you'll find the device's settings, alarms, brightness, and more.

Similar to other Echo devices, you'll find a smart home hub built-in that works with Zigbee, Sidewalk, Thread, Bluetooth, and Matter. A smart-home hub is needed for certain products to work and communicate with each other. Philips Hue has always needed a hub for its lights, and smart security systems often have hubs and base stations too. But fewer products require an individual hub to work—Abode's security system has a hub, for example, but then offers a suite of products that are hub-free. The newest Show 8 and the Show 10, and the screen-free Echo (4th Gen), also have smart home hubs. (Correction: A previous version of this piece had details about the hub wrong.)

My biggest issue with Echo Shows these days are the cluttered slideshows and, worst of all, the sponsored content. But the Echo Hub doesn't have any of that.

Since the Echo Hub's screen mostly stays on the dashboard, you aren't seeing a constant flickering slideshow that alternates between whatever content you have selected. Echo Shows have more than 40 options for onscreen slideshow content, most of which is honestly spam, and you also have to turn off each type of content in a long menu, which is annoying.

Even when the Hub does switch to your selected clock face, it doesn't show other content, so the screen isn't constantly switching and moving like an Echo Show’s would. It also means you won't see the sponsored content that is now unavoidable on an Echo Show if you aren't in Photo Frame mode. (My Echo Show 8 won't stop recommending me a weird chicken hat every four-ish slides.)

Speaking of which, the Echo Hub offers Photo Frame mode, just like the Show, which you can toggle on in the top-down menu. Amazon's photo mode isn't as nice as Google's, nor is it a true digital picture frame, but it's fine if you choose landscape-oriented photos. I like the idea that, since it's mountable, you could blend the Echo Hub into a gallery wall of photos. You can also get a separate $30 stand to add it to a tabletop.

Ultimately, if you have any smart-home devices to control, the Echo Hub is a great choice. If it was a little cheaper, I'd call it perfect.