When my wife and I bought our home just under two years ago I decided I was going to make it a Smart Home. For voice control in the home I choose Amazon’s Alexa. I was using a few Echo Dot 3rd generation devices in our previous home and at the time Amazon had recently released the 4th generation Dot. The 4th generation dot moved away from the small hockey-puck like devices to the big orb design. I ordered one to try it out and enjoyed the improved audio clarity so the 4th generation became my new standard though I would continue to use the existing 3rd generation devices I already owned. With Alexa in 14 rooms in your home and part of your daily routine to do things like turn on the lights or sing to you in the shower you start to notice the nuances between the different generations of the devices. I was growing frustrated with the inconsistent experiences as I went from room to room and for rooms like my gym I wanted a bit more “oomph” to my workout tracks. When Amazon released the 5th generation Dot and we realized asking for the time was one of our most requested verbal requests, I decided it was time to replace all of our devices with the 5th generation Dot. Amazon’s device-trade in program is great and helped us same some cash on this transaction.

So we’ve been humming along nicely with stereo paired 5th generation Dots in our kitchen, our gym, and our gaming room where we love to listen to music while playing ping pong. For select rooms we upgraded a few of the Dots to include the digital clock option so we can reduce the amount of times we have to ask for the time. My only complaint continues to be the giant power brick that comes with these devices. I wish Amazon could shrink this thing by at least half size if not more. The Pop ships with this same huge power brick. Yuck.

Well my point in sharing this history is that I’ve come to expect certain behavior with the Echo devices and so when I saw the Echo Pop I was intrigued with the design choice of chopping off most of the orb shape and moving from a 1.73” in the 5th generation to a 1.95” speaker. Certainly a smaller footprint would be nice in many places. As long as I didn’t need to stereo pair the device with an existing one I would be ok (Pops and Dot’s can’t be stereo paired, you can only pair Dots to Dots and Pops to Pops).

Visually comparing the Pop and the Dot most of my family and friends agree that the Dot is more visually appealing. The Pop looks more like a speaker, but the Pop appears to be much smaller due to the half-orb design though it’s not. The sound quality is great with both devices and for casual commands I don’t notice much of a difference. There is no visual clock option for the Pop which is a bummer because the smaller rooms where I would like to put the Pop are bathrooms where seeing what time it is while getting ready in the morning is more useful but overall if you are already invested in the Alexa devices this is not a bad addition to the product line.

The new Amazon Echo Pop is another variation on the Amazon Echo Smart Speaker theme. The shape has changed, and a couple of minor details have changed, but overall, this is another Echo speaker which performs very much like all of the other Echo speaker devices.

Although I started out with just a couple of Echo Dots several years ago, somehow Echo’s just keep multiplying, and they are now everywhere in our home. The proliferation of Alexa enabled smart devices has even further entrenched us in the Amazon Alexa ecosystem, now that we have several smart TVs and soundbars which are always waiting to spring into action when her wake-word name is mentioned (even when spoken by a character on a TV show).

The new Echo Pop has a slightly larger speaker than her brethren. At 1.95” diameter, this speaker is larger than the 1.6” speakers in my flock of Echo Dot 3rd Generation and 4th Generation units. The orientation of the speaker has also changed for the Echo Pop. This unit has a front firing speaker which projects sound more directionally than the other Echo speakers.

Like the others, the Echo Pop has dual-band Wi-Fi 802.11a/b/g/n/ac (2.4 and 5 GHz) network support. Like some of the other recent models, the Echo Pop has eero mesh network technology. If you happen to use an eero network, the Echo Pop will serve as a Wi-Fi extender in the network adding up to 1000 ft2 of coverage at up to 100 Mbps. I do not use eero mesh, so I cannot evaluate or validate those claims.

The Echo Pop measures 3.6” tall x 3.9” wide x 3.3” deep. Above the cloth covered speaker grill is the LED display for the various system notifications. The top of the plastic housing has a Volume Up button, Volume Down button and Microphone Mute button. The fourth button, which Amazon called the “Action” button has been eliminated from the Echo Pop. There is no output jack for external speakers on this model.

The Echo Pop is offered in four colors including Lavender, Charcoal, White and Teal. As usual, the power supply and cord are just white.

Something new and different for the Echo Pop is the availability of new accessories. There is a wall mountable, bracket style Shelf for the Echo Pop. Additionally, there are silicone rubber Sleeves (slip-on) offered in seven colors including, Red, Blue, Purple, Lilac, Grey, Orange, and Glow-in-the-dark. Also available is a desktop Stand for the Echo Pop which provides USB-C and USB-A charging ports.

The new Echo Pop works great and sounds good, just like the other Amazon Echo smart speaker devices. The larger, directionally oriented speaker has a slightly different sound profile than the other Echo speakers that I have, but in truth, they all sound good. In fact, the large sound produced by the small speakers and enclosures of Echo speakers has always been a pleasant surprise.

The only “problem” with Echo smart speakers is that they just seem to keep multiplying and popping up all over the house!

This is the 1st Generation of the Amazon Echo Pop which is a new low-cost smart home speaker that Amazon has produced. This speaker to me is shaped like an Orange cut in half and it measures in at less than 4” all around. The front facing flat area houses the 1.95” speaker that delivers directional sound mainly the direction is it pointing. The sound is good, but no where near-earth shattering, but it is an improvement over my 2nd Generation Echo Dot. It was able to connect to my Wi-Fi 5GHz network as well as my 2.4GHz and includes Bluetooth 5.0+, supports Matter over Wi-Fi and can function as an Eero access point, although at very slow speeds (I did not test this). There are only three buttons on the device now, Volume up, Volume down, Mic Mute and gone is the physical assistant activation button, but you can use the Vol up and down buttons together to activate it. I found that to be difficult to do since the buttons on my Charcoal color is so dark that I can’t see them unless it’s a well-lit area. There are also three visible microphone holes on top and I found them to work well even in a room with a lot of background noise such as my portable A/C blowing at full speed a few feet away from the Echo Pop. I found that this Pop will do all of the voice commands that my Dot would do and then some. Gone is the micro-USB power connection and it is replaced with a 3.5mm like power adapter that is White, and I wished it would have had a matching power cord. Also gone is the 3.5mm audio jack that my Dot had, but this is not something I used, but you want to be aware of that. Over-all this is a simple and inexpensive Alexa device if you are looking to venture into the realm of home automation or voice assistant devices. Set up is very simple in the Alexa app and you can customize a lot of things about this device.

We currently have a fan in our master bathroom water closet that has an assistant built into it but it is very temperamental and works less time than it doesn’t. Since almost all of our lighting in the house is controlled by Alexa enabled products, we wanted to get a unit for the Master Bedroom. We wanted newer technology but nothing huge as we were putting it in our media fireplace. When I saw the echo pop I thought that it would fit in well. It gives us the ability to turn lights on or off in the house as needed so no more walking through a dark house to go from one room to another. Setup was very easy and accomplished within a couple of minutes. Everything you need is included. The only drawback was this has the actual plug in to an outlet kind of cord and I was hoping for a usb style so I could plug it directly into my media center. This would have allowed me to place it where I originally wanted to. Not a deal breaker but something to keep in mind as you do have to have a power receptacle close by. While it comes in multiple colors, we got the charcoal so that it would blend in enough to basically disappear in the original location but now it is on top in plain sight. It is kind of a cute looking little thing and much less bulky than the full-size unit I have and not as outdated as the regular dots. Just as with the other units you can use the Alexa app to change the wake word to a few others though it would be nice to be able to personalize the name rather than use one of the few they already have. Within the app you can also change the accent and language that the unit uses which is kind of fun to play with. Though being Irish I wish they had an Irish accent lol. The light that comes on is not overly obnoxious and can be adjusted as well. I like that I can talk in a whisper and it will pick up my commands. For such a small unit the sound is actually pretty good on it. I have had it read audio books as well as playing music or telling me the news… all of which were crystal clear and appropriate. Just as with the others you can link them together with others you may have to create a multi room speaker system. So while it is basically a smaller newer version of the same thing we are enjoying it and it works very well for our needs.