Amazon Echo Hub

The Echo Hub is Amazon's attempt to bottle something that has, until now, mostly been the preserve of custom installers: a permanent, always-there wall panel for running the whole house. At 8 inches and barely more than half an inch thick, it's designed to disappear into a hallway or kitchen wall rather than sit on a worktop like an Echo Show, and the presence sensor that wakes it as you walk up is the detail that sells the illusion of a built-in control system.

What makes it more interesting than another Alexa screen is what's inside. Zigbee, Thread, Matter, Bluetooth and Sidewalk radios all ship in the box, which means it can talk to most of the modern smart home directly rather than relying on a pile of separate bridges. That puts it squarely at people who already own a meaningful number of connected devices and are tired of hunting through a phone app to turn the porch light off — and at anyone who has priced up a Control4 or Crestron panel and quietly closed the tab.

If your smart home is two bulbs and a plug, this is overkill; a cheaper smart speaker will do. The Hub only starts to justify itself once you have rooms, cameras, thermostats and routines worth laying out on a dashboard.

Judged on what it sets out to do, the Echo Hub largely succeeds. The room-by-room layout, category shortcuts for cameras, locks, thermostats and lights, and the customisable widgets give it the feel of a genuine control surface rather than a shrunken tablet, and the fallback to a clock and photo frame when idle means the wall space isn't wasted. At $179.99 it costs a small fraction of the professionally installed panels reviewers compare it to, and the breadth of built-in radios is the single strongest argument for buying it.

The compromises are real, though. Reviewers found it can be sluggish, which is the one flaw a wall panel can least afford — a light switch never buffers, and a control panel that hesitates invites you to reach for your phone instead. The 1280 x 800 panel is adequate at arm's length but unremarkable for a 2020s screen. Charging $29.99 extra for a stand also grates when free-standing placement is one of the two obvious ways to use the thing, and while it can stream video and play music like an Echo Show, treating it as a full media device rather than a dashboard is likely to expose those performance limits further.

One caveat on value: pricing appears to vary considerably by region, with UK listings well below the US figure, so it's worth checking local pricing before deciding whether this is a good deal or a great one. Our rating reflects the $179.99 US price.

Overall, a well-conceived first attempt at a new category that gets the concept right and the polish only partly so. Recommended for committed smart home owners, with the caveat that responsiveness — not features — is where it will either win you over or wear you down.