A review of the Amazon Echo Dot
Posted: Fri Feb 10, 2017 10:58 am
The Amazon Echo Dot is a small round unit with a microphone and small speaker for controlling smart equipment within the home. It cost £49.99 for the pleasure to be able to voice activate one room within the premises. Clearly to do all rooms in a house needs more than one unit, so it slowly is much expensive to automate the full premises than thought.
For the Echo Dot to automagically automate the home some additional stuff will be necessary; for lights, you need a bridge that cost even more money. So you slowly realise to control the complete home its an expensive hobby.
But there is one task the Echo Dot does that is a cheaper choice, play music from Amazon Prime Music with an Amazon Prime subscription; Its a nice music source for a stand-alone Bluetooth speaker or hi-fi when paired through Bluetooth.
And with Amazon Music unlimited subscription its a nice competitive to Apple music and Spotify with this Echo Dot for an extra £3.99 a month one gains access to a massive compilation of music, that uses VBR 256Kbps MP3 encoded streaming service without advertisements. With a Bluetooth BT100 receiver for a DacMagic Plus, the sound is rather nice through that receiver, even though the echo dot does not support aptX.
The nasty fact is the echo dot keeps firing into action without the activation keyword. I wish Amazon had used a double keyword combination so this doesn't occur, as stopping the music halfway through spoils the experience completely when this occurs almost randomly.
For the Echo Dot to automagically automate the home some additional stuff will be necessary; for lights, you need a bridge that cost even more money. So you slowly realise to control the complete home its an expensive hobby.
But there is one task the Echo Dot does that is a cheaper choice, play music from Amazon Prime Music with an Amazon Prime subscription; Its a nice music source for a stand-alone Bluetooth speaker or hi-fi when paired through Bluetooth.
And with Amazon Music unlimited subscription its a nice competitive to Apple music and Spotify with this Echo Dot for an extra £3.99 a month one gains access to a massive compilation of music, that uses VBR 256Kbps MP3 encoded streaming service without advertisements. With a Bluetooth BT100 receiver for a DacMagic Plus, the sound is rather nice through that receiver, even though the echo dot does not support aptX.
The nasty fact is the echo dot keeps firing into action without the activation keyword. I wish Amazon had used a double keyword combination so this doesn't occur, as stopping the music halfway through spoils the experience completely when this occurs almost randomly.