£50 off Amazon Echo at the moment.

I wonder if this price cut is related to the (lack of) announcement about Apple’s HomePod on Tuesday’s Apple event. It’s certainly what prompted me to buy…and the £50 off of course 🙂

No, they appear for this price every now and then it was the same price just a few weeks ago.

Oh and Argos has them for the same price if you want to collect.

Thanks Drac. I’ve cancelled my order and ordered it from Argos instead. Picking it up later 🙂

Good work OP, that’s Mrs P’s birthday sorted

Maybe simply trying to shift stock before releasing Amazon Tap over here?

Nah. Always have sales. It was £79 a month or so ago on Prime day.

Picked up my Echo last night so have had a bit of a play. Overall, I love it (as do the kids). I learnt some (good) stuff I wasn’t expecting, so let me share. Apologies if you know all of this.

– It plays music that I’ve purchased over the years from Amazon. Might sound obvious, but I had assumed I’d need an Amazon Music subscription to do this. OK, so it’s hardly 40 million songs, but it’s all the CDs and MP3s i’ve bought from my pre-streaming days. Bonus 🙂

– Coming into the kitchen in the morning and saying “Alexa, play Radio 2” will save me – literally – minutes every week compared to the old way I did it with iPhones, bluetooth speakers etc. You’ll be surprised how such a small thing makes me a happier person 😆

– It’s a bluetooth speaker. Again, probably obvious to most. One of the reasons I’ve hesitated buying an Echo is that I subscribe to Apple Music and it has no integration with that. I can, however, Bluetooth Apple Music from my Apple devices, so it’s not as bad as I thought.

– £99 is a bargain for a smart bluetooth speaker

On the downsides, the default TuneIn radio app drops the audio far too often. It did that on my iPhone too, and it seems a common problem with TuneIn rather than the Echo.

My Strava skill for the Alexa devices is nearly ready 🙂

My Strava skill for the Alexa devices is nearly ready

it’s gonna need a pretty chunky bar mount 😉

– £99 is a bargain for a smart bluetooth speaker

Is it? Depends how good a speaker it is… I still can’t see how I’d benefit from one of these…

I said that about an iPod many years ago. Quite amusing how many of the things I have got now…

£70 balance trying not to burn a hole in my Amazon account.

Depends how good a speaker it is…

…it’s not very good. Ok for radio/podcasts, music less so.

I think the Echo speaker is fine, it fills our front room with sound and we have it linked to the HUE lights so we it reacts to music and audio. Should be fun for halloween! The Echo Dots speaker is pretty poor, however it can be linked via Bluetooth to a bigger speaker.

If you use it with Tasker on Android ther’s a whole load of automation you can get up to with it. Turning on the PC for example using WoL.

In terms of sound quality, it’s not quite as rich and deep a sound as the £99 Sony dock speaker it has replaced in my kitchen, but that was a very basic speaker dock and nowt else. The Echo is “good enough” for kitchen duty and has all the Smart stuff too. For that reason I think £99 is good value.

[edit] – it goes surprisingly loud for little device, but it’s not a full nor deep sound; physics doesn’t allow that. I still think Apple have a niche to fill with a high(er) quality smart speaker for those with deep pockets.

On the downsides, the default TuneIn radio app drops the audio far too often. It did that on my iPhone too, and it seems a common problem with TuneIn rather than the Echo.

Might be your internet connection? TuneIn used to drop out occasionally for me when I was only on bog standard 8MB ADSL, but seems very solid on broadband. (I listen to Kerang Radio and Classic FM a fair bit via my Echo Dot)

One of the reasons I sent back my Echo was drop outs on the TuneIn Radio. Mainly used it for radio, so was a big issue for me, not might be for others.

100mb rock solid Virgin Media connection, btw.

Hmmm… ropey wifi maybe then? Interference or neighbours wifi on similar channels? Or maybe it just depends what streams you listen to on TuneIn.

Alexa, ask radioplayer for…..

Alternative to tunein