I’ve had this echo pop for a few months now and it has just gotten increasingly worse. I thought at first it was because she was new and my old echo dot was 4 years old before she wore out. This Echo Pop has continuously gone downhill to now where she doesn’t even listen. I can say her name multiple times directly to her with no background noise and she never lights up, or if she does—it’s a few minutes later after I’ve given up and her blue light just stays on, semi-pulsing with not even an “I’m sorry I didn’t get that.” The only time she lets me know she didn’t hear me is when I wasn’t even talking to her and said nothing remotely close to Alexa. I thought she was too close to the tv when we first moved but it wasn’t any different, now she’s further away from the tv and closer to the wall between her and the wifi modem and she’ll says she’s having trouble connecting to the internet—but only every now and then when she never moves. I wish I could have enough examples of her answering questions for me to even comment on her search capabilities. I’ve always used my Alexa’s excessively for timers and I’ll ask her how much longer is left on any given timer and 8/10 times there’s not a timer going even after she confirmed it nearly 10 minutes prior. She will light up sometimes when you talk to her then the light just goes off with no answer, nothing. If she says “ I didn’t get that, tell me again” her light goes OFF so you can’t even continue you have to restart. This is the worst Alexa I’ve ever had and I paid double what I have before for a “new” one and I’m truly disappointed.

I have purchased 10 recently in all of the colors ( 2 green 2 purple, 4 white, 2 grey of these units for use around my house. I got most of them when they were on an incredible sale around the holidays, and 2 later after deciding the guest bathroom and basment bathrooms needed one. I already had one device for about a year and liked it a lot, and have 2 other echo product in my house (one in every room). They work really well together and the app is easy to use to create listening groups. The sound on these is very respectable with good crisp sound and music sounds good. I have several streaming services linked and all works well with my amazon account. I also have a eero mesh system and these work to blend in and expand the 5ghz side of the network. That is what tilted my decision to get more of these. I have an excellent wifi network, but this gets the 5ghz band better coverage outside of my house now also since I have more of these on the edges of my house. I can get better coverage in my garage and on the back porch and in my shed also. Compared to other speakers of this size with the same features (smart or not smart, amazon or not amazon) value and function wise, these are on par with competators. I reccomend these.

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!