Does The New Echo Dot Mean Amazon Is Winning The Smart Home?
Amazon recently announced two new Echo devices to diversify its orignal $179 Echo.
Echo Dot: $89
At half the price, and half the size, Amazon is taking out the speaker from the original Echo and giving users who already have a good speaker an option for a cheaper voice-controlled home assistant.
Echo Tap: $129
The Echo Tap appears to be more of a portable and travel Bluetooth speaker, which also happens to include the Alexa assistant. For example, to summon Alexa, you’ll have to tap the microphone button, instead of it being always-on like the other Echo devices.
Winning?
For the last few months, most mentions of Amazon’s Echo in the press had all been positive — adding support for voice controlled Spotify, Uber, Dominos, Nest, et cetera.
And now the additional devices should increase the attractiveness to those that had previously stayed away. The big problem I see, however, is that the line up of devices still doesn’t fully address the Sonos setup and unfortunately still leaves out Apple Music. As tempting as the devices are, $180 for the original one is still a bit pricey and $89 for the half-size one with limited connection options doesn’t really make sense either.
