Echo Show 10 Review: What Can Amazon’s Rotating Display Do?

The Amazon Echo Show 10 has a unique smart display that rotates on its own. This display can rotate and follow you as you move around the room. The device has a built-in camera and microphone, so it can lock onto your position and tilt the screen toward you.

This feature is useful for watching videos, browsing through recipes, or even doing video calls, but it can also seem a bit unusual. In this review we take a look at the Echo Show 10’s rotating display, sound quality, and how it can be useful in everyday life.

How the Echo Show 10’s Rotating Display Works 

A computer analyzes your movements, follows you, and aligns itself with you. If this idea disturbs, irritates, or scares you, you can stop reading here. That is precisely what makes the Echo Show 10 special. Using its camera and microphones, the Amazon device tries to understand who is in the room and orient itself toward them.

Because it isn’t a robot, the device has no legs or wheels to move around and stays where you put it. Only the screen that protrudes from the impressively massive loudspeaker housing can rotate almost all the way around if you let it. If desired, you can also switch off the rotation function, and if that’s not enough, you can pull the integrated flap in front of the camera. Then the Echo Show 10 is blind, and the tracking function is deactivated.

According to Amazon, the camera image is converted into an abstract representation of corners, edges, and colors and analyzed with artificial intelligence on the device itself. 

How the Echo Show 10 Can Be Used in Everyday Life 

Neither the data nor the original images would be uploaded to the cloud or saved. 

A screen that stays aligned with its user could be helpful in everyday life, for example, when you move around the kitchen and keep track of what is happening on the display. And that can be a lot. To stay with the kitchen example, recipes like those from Chefkoch.de and Kitchen Stories could be displayed and read aloud. Or you could watch an episode of “Scrubs” on Prime Video while you cook. Netflix, YouTube, or Arte can also be controlled via the Echo Show 10 if you like the connection between television and cooking at all.

The Rotating Screen Can Be Awkward 

Amazon also sees the ability to move freely in front of the device during a video chat and still stay in the frame as a major advantage. However, you must rely entirely on Amazon devices and apps, as popular video chat apps like Zoom and WhatsApp cannot be used. In theory, Skype should work, but it failed on my test device, as did the address book, which crashed every time I tried to open it without an error message.

In any case, the use of the rotating mechanism needs to be well planned. There is even a template in the box that you can use to mark out the radius the Echo Show 10 needs for a complete turn. Unfortunately, my kitchen was much too small, so there wasn’t enough space for that. The Echo had to be placed on a shelf—and I was immediately frustrated. Fortunately, you can limit your range of motion for such cases.

I did not find the automatic swivelling of the screen particularly useful anyway. It may be different if you place it on a table or sideboard in the middle of the room and use it from different directions. Then you have to put up with the fact that the Echo Show 10 rotates its display noiselessly but also a little slowly. This is nothing for hectic people.

The Echo Show 10 Is Still a Typical Echo Device 

Apart from the rotating screen, the Echo Show 10 is just a typical Echo device, which you can use to address Amazon’s artificial intelligence, Alexa, if you want to know how far away the moon is or how many grams a kilogram is. The new Echo also handles such tasks well, although it can still get things wrong. It can do a lot, but it doesn’t understand what you mean when you ask for a recipe for Kokkinisto. 

Smart home devices can be controlled with the Echo Show 10 by voice command, and the appliance can also display images from electronic doorbells and surveillance cameras. This functionality requires the devices to be Alexa-compatible. A small Zigbee hub is also integrated, via which devices such as Philips Hue lamps can be networked.

Echo Show 10: Display and Sound Quality 

The 10.1-inch screen shows solid colors and is bright enough for indoor use. The loudspeaker system, consisting of a woofer and two tweeters, sounds pleasantly clear and can be very loud. It is noteworthy that the two tweeters move with the display, i.e., they align themselves to the user. As is no longer unusual with smart speakers, the sound is automatically adapted to the respective room. In addition to Amazon Music, Spotify, Apple Music, and other providers can be used to listen to music.

Conclusion 

Above all, the rotation function of the Echo Show 10 is a clever gimmick. More importantly, the sound is good, making it an excellent kitchen radio that can also read recipes and check the weather.