Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

I will give my 5 cents to this device. The unboxing experience is uneventful, however a warning here: You do need a smartphone or tablet to be setup with Alexa or this will not work. That is nowhere mentioned in the advertisement. The Alexa software is by far one of the worst I have seen in years. There is no real menu, you have to scroll through pages and pages of stuff, cluttered with things that are not helpful and confusing. Pictures and advertisement do not belong in a menu. The structure again, horrific. Neither on the Alexa app or on the device itself is a home screen where you see all your apps. It’s a cluster of menus, very hard to navigate. Now, to our device. The first thing I turned off was motion. The screen does a lousy job following you and always seems to be angled off. Even when you turn motion off, every time you hit the screen to use a menu, the screen will bounce around and you need two hands. One to hold the screen and one to use the menu. The touchscreen is very unresponsive and often needs multiple touches to respond. There is a lot of glare coming from the display as well The sound is good (not great) for a small device and you can pair Apple Music if you don’t want use Amazon Music. Warning: This device is not Airplay compatible, so it will not work in a multi-room setting in the Apple ecosystem. You can stream directly or from your phone via Bluetooth, to a single device. If you have a TuneIn Radio account you can stream from that, but I have not figured out yet how you play your favorites. The Echo will respond to stuff like “play NPR Radio on TuneIn” This device has no way to create or view playlists or use existing playlists in Apple Music. The amount of consent you have to give to let the Echo read your calendar in your email account is worrisome. I decided against it because exposing your email account to Amazon simply is not my cup of tea. The build in web browser needs work. It is super-slow and will just stop working for no reason. I have the Echo now 2days and had multiple occurrences of freezing screens and the entire Echo going dark. This also happened to me in Food Network. I turned on the news and when I came back to the kitchen 10 minutes later, the screen is dark. It simply stops, without command. The “try Alexa” feature is a nagging unstoppable insult and can get you mad enough to go the psych ward. No matter what, you cannot turn it off fully. So after careful consideration and two days of use I decided to keep it a couple more days and wait for a software update. Amazon do you hear me? Add an option to turn off “try Alexa”. Give this thing a real menu. If not, you will get it back before the end of next week. Edit: Now, on day three, it starts to just turn off. There is no setting to prevent that. Alexa is tired and goes to sleep. I am tired too and today Echo goes home to Amazon.