Amazon Echo Dot 2020 Review & Price

Review

The Amazon Echo Dot has always been about providing fledgling smart homeowners a way to get their foot in the door; about providing a place for Alexa to live inside your home and enough sound performance to fill a room up. It’s about being able to buy a cheap speaker for under $50 / £50 / AU$80.

In some of those ways, the Amazon Echo Dot (2020) lives up to the legacy set down by previous Echo Dot devices – it’s small, decently loud, and, thanks to Alexa, it’s pretty smart, too.

But the unfortunate part about the new Echo Dot is that it seems to have all the same foibles as its predecessors as well – it doesn’t have a Zigbee hub inside and, the line-out jack, while great for folks who have a big speaker system, doesn’t cater to the crowd who want to use the Echo Dot as a speaker for their audio player. It’s also not the best-sounding speaker in the world.

Long story short? The new Echo, while aesthetically different, brings more of the same as last year’s Echo Dot 3rd gen. That’s not the worst thing in the world considering how much we loved last year’s model, but the latest Echo Dot just doesn’t innovate enough to push it into the 4.0 or 4.5 range.

Price & Release Date

The new Amazon Echo Dot became available to buy on the same day as the new Amazon Echo: Thursday, October 22, 2020. Like the Echo, the Amazon Echo Dot is available in three colors – Charcoal (dark gray), Glacier White (white), and Twilight Blue (grayish-blue) – all of which are available now. 

The standard Amazon Echo Dot price is $49.99 / £49.99 / AU$79, while the Echo Dot with Clock, available November 5, costs $59.99 / £59.99 / AU$99.  

Buying an Echo Dot for your child? Check out the Amazon Echo Dot Kids Edition. It costs slightly more than the standard Echo Dot at $59.99  (likely £59.99 / AU$99 in the UK and Australia if it becomes available in those markets), but this super-cute smart speaker continues the ball-like design and makes it kid-friendly with panda and tiger-style grilles. 

There aren’t many other cheap smart speakers, but the closest competitor is the Google Nest Mini that’s supposed to cost $49.99 / £49 / AU$79, but is usually on sale for $35 / £35. So far, we like the Amazon Echo Dot a bit more than the Google Nest Mini, but we’ll need to spend some more time with it before we can say that with any sort of definitiveness.