Amazon's huge revamp of its Echo and Alexa product range on 27 September ran the full gamut of its smart-home products, but the most interesting of the lot, ironically, was the Echo Plus.
From the outside, it looks merely like a warmed-up original Echo. It's now available in silver as well as the white and black colourways of the original, but other than that, there's nothing visually to excite.
Despite that, though, Amazon has been hard at work adding features and refining the Echo's capabilities, including better audio processing, enhanced smart home features courtesy of an integrated ZigBee wireless radio, and improved far-field microphone tech and processing.
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Amazon Echo Plus UK price, release date and competition
The Echo Plus will cost £140, is available in three colours – black, silver and white – and you can preorder from today on the Amazon website. It will be released on 31 October 2017. Currently, you can grab the speaker with a Philips Hue bulb for the same price as a speaker-only package, which we can only assume is a limited preorder offer.
The speaker doesn't face any direct competition – as there are no other smart home speakers that offer Alexa's services and a smart-home hub. However, it would be silly to ignore alternatives to the Echo Plus.
For starters, there's the all-new Amazon Echo, also just announced. This is a more compact variant of the Echo Plus, costing much less at £90, but it doesn't offer the built-in ZigBee connectivity.
Then there's Google Home for £129. This smart-home speaker runs Google Assistant instead of Alexa. It's smaller, too, but yet again doesn't offer dedicated smart-home connectivity.
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Amazon Echo Plus design and sound
Coming in three colours, the Echo Plus looks the part, especially in its all-new silver colour. Size-wise, the Echo Plus measures the same as the original Echo at 84 x 84 x 235mm and it weighs 954g. The new Echo is much more compact at 88 x 88 x 149mm and weighs 820g.
In terms of design, the Echo Plus has the same two buttons as before, seven microphones and a blue LED ring at the top. The speaker grilles are located at the bottom of the device, with a 2.5in downward-firing woofer and a 0.8in tweeter lurking behind the grilles.
Although the speaker drivers themselves haven't changed, the Echo Plus now has Dolby processing, which Amazon says delivers much deeper bass, superior mids, extended highs and better 360-degree sound than last time around.
Amazon Echo Plus features
So what does this extra smart-home connectivity allow you to do? Effectively, to connect to and manage your existing ZigBee-compatible light bulbs, thermostats and so on. Details are currently a little thin on the ground on how this will work exactly, but it looks as if the Echo Plus will be able to discover and control compatible devices directly, without the need to add discrete Alexa "Skills".
The process looks simple enough, though. Say "Alexa, discover my devices" and the speaker will automatically search for compatible devices in the vicinity and create a hub where the devices can be managed.
And the list of compatible devices is pretty big. There's Philips' Hue lightbulbs, plus products from the Belkin WeMo range and from TP-Link, Hive, Nest, Samsung SmartThings, Netatmo and Tado among others. You'll find a full list of Alexa-compatible devices on Amazon's website.
Amazon didn't stop there, though. With the Echo Plus' greater focus on music, Alexa will soon be able to play music across different devices in various rooms. As long as the Echo products are connected to the same network, you'll be able to play Amazon Music, TuneIn and Spotify across all devices.
The new Echo devices will also have hands-free calling and messaging via Alexa Calling, a feature that will also come as a software upgrade to the older Echo devices.
And, in early 2018, the Echo Plus will gain the ability to make and receive landline calls via an extra piece of hardware – the Echo Connect.
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Amazon Echo Plus: Early verdict
The first Amazon Echo was a breakthrough product, but the Echo Plus is set to extend the product's reach even further and has the potential to completely revolutionise the smart-home scene – if it works as seamlessly as Amazon promises.
Of course, if you're not interested in all the smart-home stuff, you can save yourself considerable money and get the all-new Echo for £90, or even the non-speaker Echo Dot for £50. But, for me, the Echo Plus is the most interesting of all Amazon's new products, and it's still very reasonably priced.