The Amazon Echo Show is an amazing Alexa powered smart home device that is great for those that interestingly wants a well automated home. The company released it’s main 10-inch Echo Show 5 earlier this year and it was superb.

Being a premium device with all of the full potentials of a standard smart home screen, the new Echo Show 8 is a trimmed down version of the Compact Show 5 as well as the large generation Echo Show itself.

Being able to talk and get responses back in both audio-visual manner makes the Echo Show really interesting and it’s the kind of device you’ll want if you want something that not only remind you about your next appointment but also shows you maps to a location or weather forecasts and so on and so forth. Let’s talk more about the Echo Show 8 shall we.

Pretty Standard Design

1. Standard Echo buttons on top
2. Privacy shutter for the camera
3. Available in black or white

This is a bit larger device which is quite above the smaller Echo Show mainly because the latter has a really huge bezels around it’s display making the screen quite smaller. But despite the smaller frames, the Show 5 and 8 refine this, with a more appealing screen-to-body ratio on the front. 

The main difference between the Echo Show 5 and the standard Echo Show is the absence of physical buttons which includes privacy shutter atop the Echo Show 5. But still with every Echo device you can use the mute button to disconnect the camera and microphone. 

And as for color, the Show 5, Show 8 is available in white or black which isn’t bad looking for either devices.

Screen and audio quality

1. 8-inch 1,280 x 800 display
2. Dual 2-inch speakers with passive bass
3. Based on a MediaTek platform

Another amazing thing about the new mid-ranger, the Amazon Echo Show 8 is the screen size and quality of it’s audio. Considering the fact that the Echo Show has a big 1200×800 screen resolution, the Echo Show 8 on the other hand is being trimmed down by 2.1 inches which gives it a more crisp display and nice color vibrancy.

And speaking of it’s audio quality, there is an absolute step up here above the Echo Show 5. The Echo Show 8 has a Dolby-enabled audio just as the normal Echo Show but larger device could still feel cheap maybe because it costs about $100 lesser.

Both devices offer 10W per channel, while Show 8 has dual 2-inch speakers with passive bass. Another interesting about these two devices is that they both run on different Chipsets with the Echo Show using an Intel Atom based SoC while the Echo Show 8 uses a MediaTek SoC.

The only other feature of the larger Show that the Show 5 and 8 don’t have is a Zigbee smart hub built-in (like Echo Plus). If you don’t need that though, then the Show 8 is probably the Echo Show you need. 

What software powers this up

1. Again running Fire OS
2. Many Alexa skills not suited for the display
3. Basic Alexa functions work well with a screen

Amazon won’t ditch Fire OS which is a forked Android OS. The OS integrates well with the device and command works super fine on the Echo Show 8 making Alexa very capable so far you’re not using some overtly powerful dictionary wordings.

If we still examine the Alexa’s infrastructure, it’s quite obvious that this software is made to be talked/commanded rather than being interacted/touched.

As we’ve observed before, there’s a constant tension between Alexa as an audio assistant and Alexa for the Echo Show. First Impressions. The Echo Show 8 is really much affordable and does the job convincingly making it really outstanding.

At a significantly cheaper price than the larger Echo Show, the Show 8 has most of its appealing features and is also a significant step up from Echo Show 5.