Amazon will start shipping its redesigned Echo Show 10 this week, starting February 25, 2021. For those who missed the initial announcement back in September last year, Amazon has completely reworked the designed of its smart display, which includes a touchscreen that lets users interact with digital assistant Alexa and display a slideshow of photographs.
While the new Echo Show keeps the same 10-inch screen size as previous models, it now has a significantly slimmer frame and uses recycled materials, with the aluminium and fabric included in the design being sourced from 100 percent recycled sources. But the headline feature of this new model is the motorised swivel system that enables the display to reposition itself automatically so that it’s always facing you when you summon AI helper Alexa.
Amazon says it has worked hard to ensure its motorised arm is completely silent, so you won’t have to listen to any whirring as it moves. Rest assured, the Echo Show 10 doesn’t randomly decide to peer around your room on a whim. Instead, this happens when you speak to Alexa. Amazon already uses a more rudimentary version of this technology with its smart speakers, which uses LEDs to highlight the direction that it believes your voice is coming from – so you can identify when it’s correctly identified your voice or is confused with someone else in another part of the room.
Using the usual “Alexa…” wake word to summon the assistant, the touchscreen display will swivel so that it’s always in the right position for you to quickly glance and check your timers, the latest weather report, or the episode of The Grand Tour that you’re streaming from Prime Video. This swivel system also guarantees you’ll stay in-frame during a video call – no more need for relatives to crane their necks to watch you disappear as you potter around the home.
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After Alexa has swivelled the touchscreen to show-off the weather for the week, or live video feed from the smart security cameras, it will return to a neutral front-facing position.
Taking a leaf from the Google Nest Hub Max, which uses a small camera built into the smart display to add an extra camera to your Nest security system, Alexa app users who are away from home can manually take control of the moveable display to peer around the room – to check on the dog, or make sure that everything is exactly as you’ve left it.
Echo Show 10 includes a dramatically upgraded 10-inch touchscreen display. This should make the Echo Show 10 a much better gadget for video – perfect as Amazon has now brought support for Zoom video calls and Netflix to the device. Elsewhere, Echo Show 10 packs a 13-megapixel front-facing camera for improved video calls and selfies.
Like the Amazon Echo, there’s also a Zigbee hub built-in, so you won’t need to plug any extra hubs into your router as you buy Philips Hue smart bulbs, or any number of other connected home gadgets – the Echo Show 10 handles all of the set-ups so all of your new kit should work straight out of the box. Echo Show 10 starts from £239.99 and will be available in Charcoal and Glacier White.
It’s available to pre-order right now, but as stated above, won’t start landing on doorsteps until February 25, 2021.
