Amazon Echo Pop
- Dimensions: 99mm x 83mm x 91mm
- Weight: 196g
- Why we love it
- Cheap as chips
- Fast responses with the AZ2 Neural Edge processor
- Cute design
- Take note
- The Echo Dot sounds a lot better
- Missing some useful features on the UK version
- Microphones could be improved
In pictures, the Echo Pop looks like someone’s taken a saw to the Echo Dot and sliced it in half. It doesn’t look as weird in real-life, however. The Echo Pop is a fun, pretty cute-looking Alexa device with a slanting fabricated speaker-front and a plastic rear. Unlike the Echo Dot, it’s directional, and is designed to be placed in a corner or beside a wall, which is where we have our Echo speakers positioned around our home anyway.
The Echo Pop comes in four different colours, including glacial white, a lilac colour and teal, but we’ve been testing out the more reserved charcoal black variant. It’s a simple little speaker, with three buttons – two for adjusting the volume and one for muting the microphone, but there’s no action button like other Echo devices, so you can’t summon it without using the wake word. The mute button now doubles up as the pairing button and low-energy-mode toggle.
Which design do we prefer? The spherical shape of the fifth-generation Echo Dot does look a little more distinctive, being fully sheathed in fabric, but we do like that the Pop comes in more eye-catching colours and that it has a cleaner design when popped onto a bookshelf.
Unlike the Echo Dot, which lights up blue at the bottom when you shout “Alexa”, the Pop has a small bar on the top, which glows blue to tell you it’s active and listening. Out of the box, the Echo Pop paired to the Alexa app and updated a lot faster than the fifth-generation Echo Dot, which spent about five minutes updating before we could use it.
Like any Alexa smart speaker, the Echo Pop let us play music, podcasts and the radio through our streaming service of choice, we could ask it stupid questions, ask it to sing rhymes, get the weather, set timers, alarms, play little audio games, run Alexa routines and turn on smart home devices. Every question we chucked at it gave us a very quick and immediate response, no doubt due to it sporting the most recent Amazon AZ2 Neural Edge processor – not many Echo devices boast the next-generation chip.
The sound quality on the Echo Pop is decent for such a small device, featuring a 1.95in front-firing speaker, but nothing to write home about. It does lack that oomph you get with the Echo Dot 5th generation in terms of bass. It gets very loud when positioned towards you, but it’s not a hugely refined listening experience, with some mildly muddy vocals. The sound never grated on us, and we still enjoyed listening to Grimes’ 4ÆM.
Audio dramas, books on Audible and podcasts sounded decent. You get what you pay for in terms of sound. We also preferred the fact that the Echo Dot delivered 360-degree audio instead of the Echo Pop’s directional sound. We really heard the difference whenever we went out of its line of sight. We can imagine a pair of these would get you some good surround sound when linked together, however
As with the newest Echo Dot, there are a couple of frustrating differences between the Echo Pop sold in the UK and the one in the US, which severely hinders the product. Firstly, there’s no eero mesh wifi built into the device, like there is with the US model. Secondly, there’s no accelerometer in the speaker, so you can’t tap it to snooze alarms or pause music.
It’s a slight annoyance given that the three microphones aren’t the best at picking up voices. Our Amazon Echo Studio in the next room sometimes answered our questions instead of the Echo Pop right next to us. There’s no temperature sensor either, so you can’t have temperature-based routines kick into gear. These three features would have bumped up its value massively, so it’s disappointing that they’ve been omitted on the UK edition of the Echo Pop.