brings an Alexa-powered smart home together

One of the biggest barriers to running a fully smart home remains the reliance on smartphone apps and voice assistants. Setting up devices and learning how to use them is one thing, but making sure everybody in your home – not to mention visitors – can access the controls, is another.

There have been some strides made toward solving this, but now Amazon has released a device that – assuming you have an Alexa-powered smart home – could be the missing piece of the puzzle.

The $330 Echo Hub looks like a small tablet which, at a glance, you could mistake for a regular smart display like Google’s Nest Hub or Amazon’s own Echo Show. However, the difference is this new device is designed solely for easy and communal home control.

It comes with hardware to mount it to your wall and has radios inside to connect Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, Zigbee, Thread and Matter devices without needing to go through external gear or your phone – meaning quick and reliable control.

In practice, it’s like the wall panel that controls your central heating or air conditioner, except it’s connected directly to all Alexa-compatible smart gear in the house. And, unlike the Echo Show, which frustrates me constantly with its insistence on showing promoted and recommended content or “tips”, I was pleased to find the Echo Hub is all business.

You can set it to show a photo slideshow while idle, if you’d like, but when it senses someone approaching, it snaps back to a straightforward and customisable control panel.

By default, the left side of the screen lists your rooms; touch one and you’ll see all the gear set up in each, including lights, plugs, thermostats, speakers, cameras, doorbells or whatever else you have.

The Hub smartly arranges things into groups, so, for example, if you have four lights in your kitchen you’ll see a big button for each, but also a panel to let you turn all on, all off, or dim all. There’s also a screen for your routines where you can see all the schedules and rules you’ve set, with buttons to activate them right away in case you’ve woken up early and none of your lights are on.

One of the biggest barriers to running a fully smart home remains the reliance on smartphone apps and voice assistants. Setting up devices and learning how to use them is one thing, but making sure everybody in your home – not to mention visitors – can access the controls, is another.

There have been some strides made toward solving this, but now Amazon has released a device that – assuming you have an Alexa-powered smart home – could be the missing piece of the puzzle.

The $330 Echo Hub looks like a small tablet which, at a glance, you could mistake for a regular smart display like Google’s Nest Hub or Amazon’s own Echo Show. However, the difference is this new device is designed solely for easy and communal home control.

It comes with hardware to mount it to your wall and has radios inside to connect Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, Zigbee, Thread and Matter devices without needing to go through external gear or your phone – meaning quick and reliable control.

In practice, it’s like the wall panel that controls your central heating or air conditioner, except it’s connected directly to all Alexa-compatible smart gear in the house. And, unlike the Echo Show, which frustrates me constantly with its insistence on showing promoted and recommended content or “tips”, I was pleased to find the Echo Hub is all business.

You can set it to show a photo slideshow while idle, if you’d like, but when it senses someone approaching, it snaps back to a straightforward and customisable control panel.

By default, the left side of the screen lists your rooms; touch one and you’ll see all the gear set up in each, including lights, plugs, thermostats, speakers, cameras, doorbells or whatever else you have.

The Hub smartly arranges things into groups, so, for example, if you have four lights in your kitchen you’ll see a big button for each, but also a panel to let you turn all on, all off, or dim all. There’s also a screen for your routines where you can see all the schedules and rules you’ve set, with buttons to activate them right away in case you’ve woken up early and none of your lights are on.