Top critical review
3.0 out of 5 starsKinda cool, But needs LOTS of work!
Reviewed in Canada on March 14, 2021
A cool piece of tech. It certainly has some flaws though. I’m hoping some of these issues are temporary, and that they will be fixed in an update very soon.
The sound is good. I wouldn’t say great. Mids and highs are clear and crisp. Bass (meh) is kinda there IF you have the bass setting turned all the way up to full, but overall it’s fairly weak. For a screen just sitting on a fairly large speaker, and with today’s newest audio tech available, I sure expected MUCH more with this.
I set my background to my Amazon App uploaded pictures, just like I have done on my multiple other smaller Echo Show 5’s with no problems. With this new Echo Show 10 3rd Gen, its been a total headache! It cycles through my pictures for a little while, then it repeats a bunch of the same pics again for some reason, then sometimes the screen just goes completely dark. No clock, no pictures. Nothing. Just dark. I have made sure that the screen timeout Auto Sleep feature is turned OFF, so that isn’t it. Other issues are, it just gets stuck sometimes on one picture as my background, usually at the end of my uploaded pictures that it is trying to show, and it gets stuck showing it over and over again, or it gets stuck on another card/page like the weather etc, and won’t continue to cycle through my personal pictures once it’s made it’s way through them all. It doesn’t keep going on a loop in the background like it should. It should allow us to set it to shuffle or randomize the pictures being displayed in the background from our uploads on the app. Like I said, this is all working just fine on all my other smaller Echo Show 5 devices using and displaying my uploaded Amazon pictures as a background through the app, so It’s an obvious glitch with this new one. I’ve re-started the device several times, and did as much as I can on my end fooling around with it in all the different settings etc, but all these annoying weird things still keep happening. This issue alone makes me want to return it, if it can’t even handle being a simple digital frame without glitching out! Overall, It honestly does a terrible job as a digital frame/clock as It never shuffles the pictures properly while displaying them as a background. When it does work for a while, It just displays the pictures in what appears to be a straight series sequence, apparently that they were dated and taken in/uploaded.
The new Echo Show 10 3rd Gen also doesn’t seem to work great with Apple Music. Yes it will play music if you ask it too, using your Apple Music account, but that’s about it, they don’t play well together. It won’t recognize your Apple Music playlist’s that you have likely painfully taken the time to create. Sometimes, randomly it WILL recognize my Apple Music playlist, BUT it then only says it’s found and plays ONE song in that playlist , or sometimes it only recognizes a small handful of songs on a large playlist. Either way, it NEVER really works properly. Overall, It’s very glitchy with that music service, yet it advertises as being fully compatible and integrated with Apple Music.
Also, while it’s tracking you, it can’t seem to handle multiple people in the room at once very well, and it gets all confused on who to follow and often turns the opposite way of who is watching it when someone quickly walks by, which is VERY annoying. It Happens ALL the time to us here! It’s become a bit of a family joke here actually. Good luck to those with this thing in busy households with kids, like ours.
It does not go back to its standby idle position that you can set for it, for a whole 15 minutes. You may not realize it right away, but that is a long time for it to take, to go back to its original starting set idle position. This means for example, it will turn to respond to you when you are giving a verbal command at say, a sharp angle, and if you then move to a fixed position somewhere else in the room, it stays stuck where it was facing you earlier for a full 15 minutes before returning back to its starting set idle position unless you verbally direct it to move again by saying ‘Alexa’. Amazon should Let us users be able to set exactly how long we want for it to take for the Show to go back to its set idle position!
This thing often moves all over the place when it’s trying to determine exactly where I am while I’m giving it verbal commands, or while I’m typing on its screen. All this moving around and yet it very often still gets my exact position wrong.
The ‘Alexa for your day’ screen is EXTREMELY annoying!!! NOBODY wants this stupid screen that keeps popping up over and over again giving us useless Alexa command tidbits whilst interrupting our personal background pictures being shown. Please Give us the CHOICE to select whether we want this lame screen to appear or not, and don’t force it on us!
Overall, It’s certainly not all puppy dogs and ice cream with this thing. It’s a fun, cool, and a neat concept. It’s very ambitious! Sadly, in my experience with it so far it’s been very buggy, and needs some updates very quickly with some big changes and fixes. I’m Still on the fence here.