Amazon Echo Show 10 review

The Echo Show is primarily designed for Amazon’s own TV, music, audiobook and podcast services, but you can also stream audio to it from your phone or computer as a Bluetooth speaker.

It runs Amazon’s own customised version of Android with a clear and friendly home hub interface designed specifically for smart home control, TV viewing and everyday tasks such as your calendar and to-do lists. You can also connect third party services, such as radio stations or smart home systems, by installing its Alexa Skills from the Amazon Alexa app. 

We already have many smart home devices in our house, including other Echo speakers, so we added the Echo Show to our existing Alexa setup so it could control our Hue smart lights and our Hive smart thermostat.

We used the Show in our kitchen to see if it was a handy kitchen companion and portable TV, so we could stream shows as we sautéed. We also compared its responses and sound to rival devices from Apple and Google.

Alexa and us go back a long way: we’ve been using Amazon Echo smart displays for years. We use Alexa to control our smart-home devices such as our Hue smart lights, our kids use it to answer questions about life, the universe and everything, and we use Echo speakers for music, podcasts and other entertainment content. 

To test this Echo Show, we listened to it alongside other Echo devices to see how its sound differed from its smaller siblings, as that’s the key selling point for this speaker: more than any other Echo, it’s marketed as a speaker for music.

We also watched some of the top TV shows, listened to our favourite podcasts and radio stations, and controlled the speaker primarily with voice commands (but also via its screen) both in quiet rooms and with music playing loudly. 

The Echo Show 10 also visited our testing lab, where we put its screen and speakers through a variety of tests to judge their quality.

The setup process begins with its accessibility options, spoken aloud in multiple languages so you can enable those features instantly.  

The setup process for the Echo Show is more like the setup of a Fire tablet than an Echo speaker: instead of doing everything in the Alexa app on your smartphone, you do it on the Echo Show screen. That means you’ll need your wi-fi password and your Amazon account details to sign in.

Once you’ve done that you’ll be given a preview of the Show’s rotation, which you can adjust if it’s moving around more than you’d like, and you can choose whether to connect to your Amazon Photos or set up different profiles for different people in your home. 

If you already have Echo devices, the Echo Show will automatically import your smart home information – so for example, in our house it instantly knew about the Hue lights and Hive smart thermostat we’d previously added in the Alexa app. If this is your first Echo device you’ll need to add them via the Alexa app on your phone or say: “Alexa, discover devices.” 

Imagine a standard Echo speaker with a Fire tablet glued to the front of it – and you’ve more or less imagined the Echo Show. It’s a large, squat cylinder roughly the size of a small melon, and at the top there’s a motorised mount that holds and moves an iPad-size tablet.

It looks like a Fire tablet and it works like one too, albeit one that’s running a smart home app.  

By default, the display is a simple wallpaper or photo display with a prominent digital clock, but when you swipe from the top you get apps such as music, smart home, video and cooking.

The smart home app shows key information such as the current heating temperature, which smart lights are switched on and so on, and of course the information it displays will depend on what’s connected. 

The rotating screen takes a bit of getting used to: in addition to tracking you during video calls, it swivels to face you when you speak to it. There’s a sliding cover for the camera and you can turn off the mic, too.  

It’s worth noting that while the screen moves, the speakers don’t: they remain pointing in the same direction no matter which way the screen is facing. 

If you have other Echo devices, the Echo Show won’t necessarily be the one that responds to you: sat between an Echo and the Echo Show, we sometimes found that the screen-free speaker heard us better and that we had to specify the Echo Show to play our music on it.

Once playing, however, we could address whatever speaker was nearest with commands – turn it up, skip this one, and so on – and Alexa would understand that we meant the music playing on the Show. 

There’s a good range of apps here, including non-Amazon services: Apple Music, Spotify, Netflix and YouTube are all here, and while there’s no iPlayer app, you do get BBC Good Food in the Kitchen section. There’s also a web browser for services that Amazon hasn’t provided an app for. 

As ever with Amazon, accessibility options are comprehensive, easy to understand and easy to activate. There are also excellent parental controls. 

Amazon’s microphones are impressive: even with music turned up loud and/or when we were quite far from the device, Alexa heard us almost all of the time and with much better voice recognition accuracy than Apple’s Siri. Controlling our smart lights and heating was easy, accurate and instantaneous.  

The device was generally smooth in everyday use, without the long delays in responding to requests that plague Apple’s HomePods.

We encountered the occasional lag in pulling up the smart home app, but that was a rare occurrence. Similarly, video calls and audio were usually instant and we very rarely encountered any lag or performance issues. 

Sound quality is very impressive given the relatively small size of the speakers: unless you push it hard, it’s nice and musical with reasonably good bass, although when playing older music it can be a little bass-light.

Turn it up too loud and the sound becomes harsh, but this isn’t really a device for wall-shaking music: we used it to listen to radio stations, Olivia Rodrigo and Fleetwood Mac while cooking, and it was more than loud enough to compete with the combination of a splattering pan and a noisy cooker hood. The difference in volume and bass compared to a standard 10-inch Fire tablet’s tiny speakers is dramatic. 

Ten inches turns out to be the perfect size for kitchens, where the Show did double duty as a YouTube recipe viewer and a Prime Video show streamer. In both cases the sound was very impressive, too: dialogue was crisp and clear, the speaker was inspiringly boomy during the action scenes, and being able to pause a recipe video with your voice is very useful when you’ve got floury fingers.

So if you fancy watching Deadloch while kneading dough, this could be the perfect device for you. 

Like other Echo devices, you can set up the Echo Show in the Alexa app to play music in different rooms simultaneously. You can’t pair the Show with a non-Show Amazon Echo to create a stereo pair but you can pair it with a subwoofer for extra low end thump.  

The included 13MP camera is primarily intended for video calling, but you can also use it as a security camera. To do that, swipe down and select Settings > Camera > Home Monitoring, and enter your Amazon password.

You can now access the camera and rotate the Echo Show from your phone via the Alexa app, although it doesn’t record the video stream. The Echo Show also supports Drop In, enabling you to call it directly for a voice or video chat from your Alexa app. 

As this is an Amazon device, there are two prices here. There’s the official price, and there’s the price Amazon actually expects you to pay. At full price the Echo Show feels a little too expensive for what it does.

But at a more realistic price, such as the 30% to 40% discounting we tend to see around Prime Day and Black Friday, it’s an excellent buy.  

Apple doesn’t have a home hub, but an iPad running iPadOS 17 does much the same job with its friendly widgets. It isn’t motorised but its camera is wide angle and tracks you during FaceTime video calls.

And while it can’t compete with the volume of the Echo Show 10, it delivers surprisingly loud sound.

Because tablets have a much wider choice of available apps you can install pretty much any TV, movie or music streaming app you like, play games and so on. If you’re all-in on Apple products already this may be a better kitchen counter computer. 

Amazon’s tablet offers many of the same features and many more apps –everything from Now TV and Disney+ to iPlayer and Microsoft Office.

This one won’t follow you around the room and its speakers are much more weedy than the ones in the Echo Show, but during the last Prime Day its price was cut to £74.99 – so you could buy it plus two Echo Dot speakers for just under £120, less than half what a single Echo Show currently costs.

It’s highly likely that we’ll see similar deals in October and November for the next Prime Day and Black Friday respectively. 

Google’s tablet-shaped home hub is a very smart device, albeit a little smaller than the Echo Show: the screen here is 7-inch to Amazon’s 10.1-inch.

There’s a single speaker so it’ll be a bit less impressive on the sound front too, although this version is more bassy than the first generation.

But the apps here are excellent, you can use gesture control if you can’t currently touch the screen and there’s excellent smart home integration with a wide range of smart devices.

We liked the Echo Show a lot, once we got over the weird feeling of being watched.

For us, it’s ideal as a kitchen all-rounder where it can play music, audiobooks, YouTube recipes and podcasts, stream TV shows and remind us which family member is supposed to be where and when.

Provided you’re OK with the selection of available apps and Alexa Skills, it’s an excellent home helper.