Echo Show 15 review: Amazon’s biggest Alexa smart display gets even better | The Verge

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This Echo Show on the wall is the fairest smart display of them all. Updates to support Fire TV, new widget options, and a better Photo Frame mode make the flagship Echo a winner.
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See All by Jennifer Pattison Tuohy
If you buy something from a link, The Verge may earn a commission. See our ethics statement.
Posts from this author will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed.
See All by Jennifer Pattison Tuohy
The original idea for Amazon’s Echo Show was a large screen-based device that would offer up relevant, glanceable information for the modern family, replacing outdated devices like bulletin boards, paper calendars, and sticky notes on the fridge. In 2017, Amazon couldn’t quite achieve that vision for a price that a modern family would be willing to pay. So, instead, it released a small, squat seven-inch touchscreen smart speaker that, frankly, did little more than Amazon’s screenless Echos.
But it was a start. And as the Echo Show has evolved over the ensuing years, the company finally has a device that it thinks fits that original vision: the Echo Show 15.
​​Poor camera quality (especially considering the price)
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The $249.99 Echo Show 15 is billed as a shared hub for families to see things like upcoming calendar appointments, to-dos, digital sticky note reminders, and shopping lists. It’s also an excellent kitchen TV thanks to the addition of the Fire TV interface. Of course, it does everything other Echo displays and speakers do, thanks to the presence of Amazon’s smart voice assistant Alexa. This includes playing music, showing weather reports, streaming video, controlling smart home gadgets, and telling fart jokes — all of the stuff you’ve come to rely on Alexa for.
A very solid piece of hardware, the Echo Show 15 is a stunning device. It looks impressive on your wall when called into action and otherwise blends into the background as a digital photo frame displaying art or family photos. It fills a niche that no device has reliably conquered to date: a wall-mounted tablet to replace the plethora of analog paper tools busy households traditionally rely on to communicate with each other. You can use it on your countertop with an optional stand if you can find the room — at 15.8 x 9.9 x 1.4 inches, this thing is huge — but the wall is the better option.
The concept is good. But the execution is underwhelming in places. As is a theme with Amazon devices, on day one, there was plenty of room for improvement on the software front. There’s a lot crammed onto this admittedly large screen, but ultimately, while the Echo Show 15 tries to be something for everyone, it ends up struggling to be particularly useful for anyone.
The addition of Fire TV and the updated Photo Frame feature (which turns the entire display into a digital picture frame) since launch have significantly improved the device. You can read my full thoughts on the Fire TV experience here. But there are still areas for improvement. (Namely, the widgets, which I’ll get to.)
The Echo Show 15 is a 15.6-inch screen with a 1080p touch display, with the power of the new Amazon AZ2 neural edge processor behind it — the first Show to use Amazon’s latest chip. While it’s noticeably snappier than others in the family, it’s not super responsive and takes two or three seconds to respond to taps and swipes.
A new homescreen layout divides its time between the standard rotating Echo Show content (which you can customize) and a new feature: widgets. You can also have it just display art or photos (stored in Amazon Photos or Facebook, nowhere else, sadly), fulfilling its picture frame ambitions.
Aesthetically, the Echo Show has a black frame with a white mat, resembling a standard picture frame. Tech-wise it looks like the Samsung Frame TV and the Facebook Portal had a baby.
It comes in one color, and you can’t change the familiar Alexa blue background behind the widgets — I’d like to see some customization options all around. Two 1.6 speakers on either side (or top and bottom in portrait) provide decent if slightly tinny sound, and a small row of buttons on the top or side (depending on orientation) offer volume up / down, mute, and camera shutter controls.
The Show 15, like Goldilocks’ proverbial porridge, is just right — at least in terms of size
The widget concept is a nice addition, and the potential is huge — especially as Amazon has released an API that developers can use to add widgets to their Alexa skills. When I first tested the device, there were a dozen or so Amazon widgets that were limited in their usefulness.
They include calendar and reminders (you can import calendars from Google, Apple, and Microsoft), shopping list, sticky notes, smart home controls, a to-do list (Alexa only), weather, your commute, photos, maps, music and audio, reorder suggestions, Alexa suggestions, and your Amazon deliveries. A “What to Eat” option offers up recipes and nearby delivery suggestions from partners such as Domino’s and Whole Foods.
In our app-driven world, you likely already have favorite tools that do most of these things, and frustratingly, you can’t port any of them to the Show. It’s mainly Amazon for now. A few developers have jumped on board in the last 12 months. There’s a Big Sky weather widget, one from The Daily Show, and an Ambient Visions widget that turns your Show display into video of Christmas scenes, a roaring fireplace, a tropical beach, a mountain lake, or — my favorite — an aquarium complete with sound effects. The Magic 8 Ball widget