A review of the Amazon Echo Dot

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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.

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An issue that should be noted is the Echo Dot does not conform to the UK wireless 802.11ac standard or the 802.11n 5Ghz standard. It does not support channels 100-136 on the 5Ghz band here in the UK which causes issues for those experiencing interference on manual channels 36-48 when a router moves to higher 5Ghz channels automatically. This is clearly a design fault and this point should be brought to the attention of the reseller for the information would be passed to Amazon. The fact it is a design fault from a manufacturer would allow the device for its return for a full refund passed the 1-year standard guarantee in EU.