It follows you by rotating the screen while you chat in a video call, prepare a recipe according to the instructions of an online video or when you ask the virtual assistant for the weather forecast for the day. Amazon’s Echo Show 10, the latest in the family of smart speakers evolved into intelligent screens, is a sort of little robot: it has a 10-inch HD touch display with a 13-megapixel camera that rotates 360 degrees, mounted on a speaker equipped with two tweeters for high and medium and a woofer for the bass, which adapt to the surrounding environment. It sounds surprisingly good, but above all it orients the display and the camera by identifying our position in the room.
Every now and then he gets stunned, with more people he gets confused, the autofocus has reaction times that are not always record-breaking, but on the whole he does not do badly. It also offers the ability to browse the web, listen to the radio, watch the news and has great quality in video conversations and on the musical side, as we said, it beats up with high-end speakers. Compared to the previous version, the Echo Show 8 which has a similar screen in resolution (we are still today, surprisingly, under the full hd), the steps forward are clear as well as the price difference: from 110 to 250 euros (249, 99 to be precise). We would have expected, right on the display, something more. Especially if it is proposed as a device on which to watch movies and TV series on Prime Video and Netflix. In reality it is good for video calls, as long as the interlocutor has the Alexa app, for GialloZafferano recipes or seen on YouTube, which can only be reached via browser.
It can act as a security room, but activation and management is cumbersome. You have to make a video call from your smartphone always through the Alexa app, which is a bit Soviet in design, with the “Drop in” function. The camera, however, at night, not being infrared, sees little or nothing. Finally, to stop the call you have to jump through hoops.
The Echo Show 10 resembles in some ways the Facebook Portal, the first to bet everything on video calls. It is a series of smart screens composed of different models equipped with a camera capable of partially following the interlocutor, without however the rotation system. Compatible with Messenger and WhatsApp, the Amamzon Shows are not and this is a heavy limitation, they have fewer features than the Echos. In fact, they are designed for video conversations and on that juncture they manage to do their job very well. The most expensive model, the Portal +, has a 15-inch display that can be oriented both vertically and horizontally. Even today in size it is a unique smart screen. He too has Amazon’s Alexa assistant, a 12.5 megapixel camera, four microphones and a speaker system with two tweeters and a woofer. The price has recently been lowered from € 299 to € 249. That’s 99 cents less than Show 10, at least at the time of this writing.
On the Friday of 23 April 2021
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