Tech brief Breaking

Amazon's New Echo Lineup: A $99.99 Echo Dot, an Echo Studio With a Camera and a Smart Alarm Clock

By , Tech Cheat Codes Team

Published 6 min read

Photo: Amazon's new Echo Show 16, Alexa Photo Frame, Echo Time, Echo Studio with Home Camera and Echo Dot side by side.
Image: Amazon
On this page · 3 sections
  1. What each new device does and costs
  2. What to know before you buy
  3. References

The Echo Dot, the little ball speaker sitting on a lot of kitchen counters, has a new version, and it costs $99.99 (price as of ; official source). That's the price Amazon put on its redesigned Dot this morning, when it announced five new Alexa devices at once. The new Dot does a lot more than the old one. At that price, it's a bigger purchase than many people picture when they hear "Echo Dot."

The other headline is a camera. The new Echo Studio with Home Camera, Amazon's best-sounding speaker, now has one built in, so you can look into the room from your phone and hold things up for Alexa to see. Amazon also added a $199.99 (price as of ; official source) smart alarm clock called Echo Time, a digital photo frame and a bigger, thinner Echo Show 16 that runs Fire TV.

Most of it is on sale today. The Echo Show 16 is the exception: it's pre-order only and ships later this year.

What each new device does and costs

The Echo Dot is $99.99 and ships today. It gets Amazon's AZ3 chip, four microphones and what Amazon rates as 50% more bass. The bigger change is that it's now a smart home hub, with support for Zigbee, Matter and Thread, the three main standards smart lights, locks and thermostats use to talk to each other. That means many of those gadgets connect straight to the Dot without a separate hub box. It also works as an eero Wi-Fi extender, adding up to 1,000 square feet of coverage, but only to an existing eero network. If your Wi-Fi comes from your internet provider's router or another brand, that part won't help you. It comes in Graphite, Glacier White, Agave Green and Coral Pink. Kids versions with octopus and penguin designs start at $109.99 and include a year of Amazon Kids+.

Photo: A blue Echo Dot sphere with a glowing light ring sits on a wooden desk while a woman writes in a notebook.
Image: Amazon's new Echo Dot on a desk. Image: Amazon

The Echo Studio with Home Camera is $249.99 (price as of ; official source) and also ships today. It's the same big speaker, with Dolby Atmos and a woofer for bass, plus a camera. In the Alexa app you can open Live View to check on the room while you're out, the way you'd check a pet camera. Alexa can also recognize things you hold up to it, like a board game box or a box of cereal. Video calling through a Fire TV is coming later, with no date yet. The regular Echo Studio without a camera stays on sale at $219.99 (price as of ; official source).

Photo: A dark gray Echo Studio speaker sits on a wooden shelf beside books and a table lamp.
Image: The new Echo Studio on a shelf. Image: Amazon

Echo Time, at $199.99 and available today, is built for the nightstand and has no camera at all. It's a round clock with a 3.2-inch touchscreen and hundreds of clock faces, including some with Harry Potter and DC characters. The interesting part is an optional smart alarm. Instead of waking you at an exact minute, it watches for lighter sleep and wakes you at the best moment within 10 to 60 minutes of your set alarm. It does that without a watch or wristband, using room sensors and ultrasound to pick up breathing. The screen also brightens slowly before the alarm, like a sunrise, and dims at night. A kids version starts at $209.99 with a year of Kids+.

Photo: A woman wakes up in bed next to a pink Echo Time clock on her nightstand.
Image: Echo Time, Amazon's new alarm clock, on a nightstand. Image: Amazon

The Alexa Photo Frame costs $199.99 in black or $229 in birch or walnut wood. It's a 10-inch anti-glare touchscreen in a real frame, and it pulls pictures from Amazon Photos, which gives Prime members unlimited photo storage. You pick the people or albums, and new photos of them appear as they're taken. That's the gift pitch: Grandma's frame fills up with the grandkids without anyone mailing her prints. Alexa chooses which shots to show based on faces, dates and mood, and skips screenshots and receipts, and you can record a voice note to go with a photo. It comes with 90 days of Alexa+.

The Echo Show 16 costs $499.99 (price as of ; official source), or $569.99 with a Nanomatte anti-glare screen, and it's pre-order only for now. The new big-screen Echo has a 16-inch screen with 10% more viewing area than the Echo Show 15, in a frame nearly 40% thinner. It runs the full Fire TV experience and comes with a remote. Its 13-megapixel camera is the first on an Echo Show with night vision. Pre-orders get $100 off. Stands cost extra, $69.99 or $124.99 for one that swivels and tilts.

What to know before you buy

Several features on these devices need Alexa+, Amazon's newer AI version of Alexa. It's included with a Prime membership, so if you don't have Prime, check which features you'd get before counting on one from the ads.

If a camera in the living room makes you uneasy, you have choices. Every Echo has a button that turns off the microphones and any camera. On the Echo Studio with Home Camera, a light comes on whenever the camera is sending images or video to Amazon's cloud. And you can just buy the camera-free Studio for $30 less. The Echo Time has no camera, which makes it the more obvious pick for a bedroom.

If you're shopping for a parent or grandparent, the photo frame is the simplest of the bunch. It mostly sits there showing pictures, and someone else can keep it filled from their phone. The catch is that it relies on Amazon Photos, so the pictures need to be in Amazon Photos.

Amazon also showed Alexa Home Map, a 3D map of your house with each light, lock and camera placed where it really sits, so you tap the thing on the map to control it. You build it by scanning rooms with a compatible iPhone. It arrives in preview later this year on iPhone, in the Alexa and Ring apps and on bigger Echo Show screens, and some of its camera features need a paid Ring plan.

Amazon hasn't listed shipping dates past "later this year" for the Echo Show 16. Everything else is available to order now.

References