Amazon's Echo Hub is one of the best smart home devices I've tested, and it's $125 for Black Friday

What’s the deal?

The Amazon Echo Hub is a surprisingly dependable smart home panel with Alexa. It’s on sale for $125, which is a $55 discount (33%), for Black Friday.

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ZDNET’s key takeaways

• Amazon typically sells the Echo Hub for $180, but it’s on sale for $125 for Black Friday. 
• The Echo Hub gives Alexa the place it has earned in the smart home market: A control panel to easily access smart devices, no ads, and no unnecessary fluff.
• The smart display can be slow and buggy, especially while loading multiple camera views. 

Many smart home enthusiasts, myself included, are tired of juggling dozens of apps on their phones to control the smart devices in their homes. While the release of Matter alleviates this hassle, the new smart home connectivity standard has yet to get enough support to eliminate the challenge.

As a result, many of us are left looking for smart displays that can give us quick access to control our devices. Some tech-savvy folks may use a repurposed old tablet mounted to the wall as a smart home control center, while others opt for a smart display like an Echo Show or a Google Nest Hub that can already function as a smart home controller out of the box, among other things.

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These devices always have their drawbacks. Amazon’s Echo Hub is designed to fill a gap in the smart home controller market by being what these devices are not: a smart home controller and only that. 

There are no frills with the Echo Hub. There’s no spatial audio speaker attached to its base, no ultra-high definition for streaming, and no ads to display while in standby mode. It doesn’t serve any purpose besides being a smart home hub and controller.

Testing the Echo Hub for the past few months has been a refreshing experience. Its navigation is sorted into categories and widgets. At a glance, the Echo Hub displays your widgets on about two-thirds of the screen, with your routines and rooms on the left side and device categories at the bottom. You can customize the widgets and download more from the widgets store.

The 8-inch touchscreen display can be wall-mounted, which is my preference, as I’ve always wanted to repurpose a tablet as a wall-mounted smart panel or to prop it up on a flat surface using a table-top stand. 

Also: I gave away my Kindle and iPad within hours of testing this tablet – and it’s up to $180 off

Aside from being a smart home control panel with the Alexa voice assistant, the Echo Hub, as its name indicates, works to connect Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, Zigbee, Matter, Thread, and Sidewalk smart devices. 

Wait, if Amazon already has the Echo Show, why make the Echo Hub? The Amazon Alexa smart home network is quickly becoming one of the largest and most intuitive smart home automation systems available. The system supports 100 million devices and is the most compatible.

The Alexa app quickly connects new devices you add to your smart home with little effort on your end and lets you control devices from different manufacturers in one place. If a smart home device says it “works with Alexa,” you can trust the technology will be easy to set up and control with the Alexa app, the voice assistant, and now the Echo Hub.

Also: Amazon’s Echo Show 5 made me a smart display believer

I currently have four Echo Shows and four other Echo speakers, so there’s a lot of Alexa in my home. As an Apple HomeKit house, I got an Echo speaker to see how Alexa fared against Siri.

I then got my kitchen’s Echo Show to listen to music or watch the news while cooking dinner and to control smart home devices, but also because I thought the display would give me better views into my calendar, which wasn’t the case. The Echo Hub does exactly what it promises to do: give me a clear view into my smart home and a quick way to control it.

I’ve never been quiet about the Echo Show’s shortcomings, especially as a person who uses the technology daily. I dislike that I can’t control what is displayed during standby, that Alexa only understands me about 70% of the time, that the hardware itself is slow and laggy, that an app like YouTube, which requires a browser, is so hard to navigate with your voice, and that smart home control is such a secondary feature.

ZDNET’s buying advice

Because Alexa can handle many different devices, maintains a reliable connection, and makes routines easy to use, I hate to admit that I reach for it more often than my Apple Home app. The Echo Hub puts all that convenience on my wall, within my reach. I can easily run routines from the hub, arm or disarm my Ring Alarm system, check my security cameras, adjust the downstairs thermostat, or turn a light on or off on my way upstairs for the night.

During setup, you can choose which Echo device in your home to play music on when you ask Alexa on the Echo Hub to play something, as it’s not a speaker — another differentiator between the Echo Hub and other Echo devices. This approach means you don’t get an Echo Hub instead of an Echo speaker if you still want to play music, especially if you want smart speakers around your home.

Like many smart home users, I am only reluctant to completely give in to Alexa and Amazon due to privacy and security concerns, especially considering that data is not handled locally. While companies can always claim to prioritize consumer privacy, you can only take them at face value regarding your personal information.