The Amazon Echo Hub Is the No-Frills Smart Display I’ve Always Wanted

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.)

Spam-Free

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.