Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

I purchased this combo with the intent of replacing my standard Echo Show so that I can have a larger screen to see my family that lives very far away. We've been doing this with the normal Echo Show for a while now and thought we could benefit from the larger screen of the 10 inch tablet. It honestly pains me to write such a poor review of the feature, but I am focusing this purely on the 'Show Mode' functionality for which I purchased this. To be clear, I've owned a number of Amazon devices in the past, both Fire tablets and Echo devices, all of which I've been happy with (when setting up this tablet it said it was my "Sixth Kindle Fire"). To start, the sound is tinny and terrible, and for a device that focuses on audio and video, this is way below par, especially considering they market it as having 'Dolby Atmos' sound. So using it for anything besides very basic audio functionality is a far cry from a decent experience. To try to rectify this, I paired it via bluetooth to a much better speaker... but there are limitations to this when in 'Show Mode'... When I attempted to call people on the tablet via Show Mode, I could not hear them speak. Turning off the bluetooth returned the audio to the tablet and the terrible speakers. Second, the 'Show Mode' functionality is really just a 'skin' more or less over the FireOS (read: Android) functionality. It does not give you a true Echo experience. When playing music it uses the tablet's music player. The experience is laggy and poor, the audio even to the bluetooth speaker is clipped (I do not experience this issue outside of 'Show Mode'), which made playing Jeopardy an interesting experience. Speaking of calling people through Show Mode. The video processing is EXTREMELY sluggish. People on the other end of the connection said that I looked jumpy and the audio did not match up when I was speaking. This is a completely opposite experience from a standard Echo Show. Finally, the show dock is not needed for show mode. I wasn't entirely clear on this when I purchased the device and while it would be a great addition if the show functionality worked, it really is more or less unneeded and is a very expensive addon. Bottom Line: The 'Show Mode' functionality is half-baked poor performing parody of a true Echo experience, which is unfortunate. As a side note: As I said, this was written on the functionality of 'Show Mode' and the Show Dock and has nothing to do with the tablet itself. I have an additional Kindle Fire HD 10 which we are very happy with (though I had not received the 'Show Mode' update on it yet or I would have found out that I didn't need the dock). The Fire HD 10 is a great device at its price point.