Our new TV came with a free bonus: an Amazon echo show 5 (Second Generation).
I’ve always been on the fence about smart home devices. I like the idea of being able to control certain aspects of my house through my phone or with my voice, but I’m also paranoid about being hacked or spied on. In this case, my techie side won out. I couldn’t pass up the opportunity to try out a new type of device.
Long story short, the echo show 5 is okay, but I won’t be using it for most of the stuff it can do.
Unboxing and First Impressions
Unboxing the es5 was a no muss, no fuss process. The perfectly square, prettily turquoise box is sealed with a single piece of tape that’s just a slice of a razor blade away from being broken. The device itself is right there on top, covered in a plastic envelope of sorts. Beneath the es5, at the bottom of the box, is an area sectioned off by a folded piece of cardboard that contains the power adapter and documentation.
The es5 is super cute. It’s a black, wedge-shaped little device. The back and sides are covered in a mesh-like fabric. Across the front of the device is a 5.5″ touchscreen screen. The screen is very bright, though it isn’t the sharpest I’ve ever seen. There’s a soft edge to it, almost like it’s blurry. But given its small size, it’s not a big deal. The touchscreen itself is very responsive.
It charges with a 15W power adapter through a port on the back. The adapter is one of those giant blocks with the cord attached to it. It’s so chunky that it’s sometimes hard to find a good place in which to plug it. And why, oh why, is it white when the es5 is black? It looks so tacky.
There’s a microUSB port beside the charge port that, as far as I can tell, isn’t accessible to users. I plugged in several (black!) cords to see if I could use them to power the device. Nothing happened. Then I plugged the cords into my laptop to load some photos to use as wallpapers. Envy (said laptop) recognized the device, but I couldn’t access its file system. My guess is that it’s there for diagnostic purposes.
All of the important buttons, which are small and round, are situated along the top ledge of the es5. There are two separate volume buttons (marked “+” and “-“), the power button, and a sliding button that lets you cover/uncover the camera hole. There’s also a tiny microphone hole.
The speaker grill sits along the bottom edge of the screen. The surprising thing is that that single grill gives off sound like it’s coming from everywhere. I wasn’t expecting so much oomph from such a small device. And it practically growls with bass. Oh, yes, she kicks nicely! It’s fantastic. But if the default sounds don’t strike your fancy, you can always adjust things with the equalizer settings.
There are some nice customization options too. You can change the wallpaper, the screensaver, and the clock. The es5 includes a lot of nice images and placement options for that purpose. I turned off most of the other features that require Wi-Fi, like the news and weather, because we don’t have home internet service, and I knew it wouldn’t be connected to my phone’s hotspot much. When it’s offline, the es5 displays a plain background with the time.
It’s possible to use your own photos as wallpapers too. For that, you have to upload them to Amazon’s cloud services. This is one of the reasons why I wanted that microUSB port to work—so I could load my own photos manually. I’m not sure how much onboard storage the device has anyway, which might explain why the port doesn’t work.
Setup and Performance
The setup process was a complicated mess. After I first booted up the es5, it took forever to get the device fully up to date. I spent several hours across multiple days trying to get the updates downloaded and installed (even though our phone networks have superfast 5G speeds). Then I spent several more hours trying to set things up. At one point, I got so frustrated that I put the thing back in the box for a couple of weeks.
Now, I know my way around tech fairly well. Anything that I don’t know how to use, I’m usually able to figure out eventually. Not so with the es5. The UI is bad. It never works the way I thought it should. On top of that, I never knew whether something had to be done on the device or through the Alexa app. I felt like I was constantly jumping between the two, going ’round and ’round in circles without getting anything done.
Which brings me to the biggest problem with the es5: Skills. I don’t really get it. Skills are supposed to let you teach Alexa how to do new things. O-kay. But even after reading a great guide on the subject, the system just doesn’t make much sense to me. I guess I was expecting it work something like Apple’s new StandBy feature. It probably doesn’t help that I never actually speak to Alexa.
My biggest frustration was that I couldn’t figure out how to listen to music through that wonderful speaker. I primarily use the free version of YouTube Music, which isn’t on the music service Link list. I don’t have paid subscriptions to Spotify or Amazon Music Unlimited, so I couldn’t use Alexa to stream anything through those services. Plus, there didn’t seem to be a way to stream my own music library that didn’t involve employing a bunch of workarounds or using a Skill that usually wanted more access to my phone than I was willing to give.
Turns out, the answer to the problem was so freaking simple: use Bluetooth! I found out that I could connect the phone via Bluetooth to the es5. Why couldn’t they have just said that in the first place?! Why hadn’t I thought of it myself?
When I paired my phone with the es5, everything worked fine. The es5 chirped and announced that the two were connected. Then I could seamlessly switch between YouTube Music, Spotify, and my personal library. When I’m streaming music, the screen shows a playback screen similar to what you would see in the car: a dark blue background with a lighter blue square for cover art (blank with the Bluetooth symbol inside of it) and the back/forward controls.
When I was done, the device chirped a different tone than before and announced that my phone was no longer paired. I was happy with how this worked.
Conclusion
I can see how a device like the echo show 5 could be useful. But as things stand right now, the echo show 5 isn’t for me. It shouldn’t be that hard to set up or so confusing to use. Moreover, it’s basically useless without home internet service.
I thought about selling it back to Amazon, but I ended up liking the speaker so much that I use it to listen to music now. I probably use it more than my actual stereo or my other Bluetooth speaker. So, everything worked out in the end.