Amazon is driving the prices even lower on its Echo speaker lineup with the new Echo Pop. This new model trims a few of the sensors from the Echo Dot (Gen 4 or 5) and simplifies the design to bring its retail price to $40 while actually increasing the speaker driver size a touch.
While the Echo Pop offers most of the same functionality as the Echo Dot, discounts on the Dot take a lot of the sense out of picking the Echo Pop. It’s a decentsmart speakerand does its job well, but it’s neither the smartest nor the cheapest Alexa option coming from Amazon, leaving it in a confusing spot.
Amazon Echo Pop
The Echo Pop could have been a steal for an Alexa-powered smart speaker. It’s got decent sound and listens for commands well, but it trimmed some nice-to-haves from the Echo Dot without trimming enough from the price. And it doesn’t help one lick how often the Echo Dot is actually available for less than the new Pop.
Price and availability
The Amazon Echo Pop costs $40 and is available directly from Amazon. It comes in four colors: black, white, lavender, and teal. Thanks to its newness, it hasn’t seen any big deals yet to bring that low price any lower.
Design, hardware, what’s in the box
The Echo Pop sees a shift in design from the orb-likeEchoandEcho Dotlines. It stands out as a distinct product, even if it’s effectively stepping in to fill the shoes of the Echo Dot as Amazon’s new cheaper option. It looks almost like an Echo Dot that’s been sliced neatly in half, curving gently around the back side only to go perfectly flat for the front speaker side.
You can’t expect too much out of the bill of materials for such a low price. Simple plastic covers the rear of the Echo Pop, though the face at least has a fabric-like finish more akin to the Echo Dots. While the Echo and Echo Dot position their LED light bars, which serve as status indicators, around the unit’s base, the Echo Pop has a small arc of LEDs along its top edge.
I find the bar rather disruptive to the aesthetic of the Echo Pop when it’s not lit up, whereas it’s much more subtle on the Echo and Echo Dot. It’s quite easy to see the bar when it’s lit up on the Echo Pop, but it doesn’t have quite the same effect as the Echo and Echo Dots lights, which offer 360 degrees of lighting and light up the surrounding surface to a degree.
Just around the back of the light bar, the Echo Pop houses a trio of microphones, two volume adjustment buttons, and a mute microphone switch that turns the lights red when toggled. A barrel power port sits at the back of the unit and wires out to a chunky power adapter for such a small device. It’s unfortunate not to see USB charging that could have enabled a little more flexibility. Still, Amazon’s choice at least simplifies the matter of ensuring the Echo Pop gets sufficient power — something that’s a bit more of a question over USB.
The 3.5mm jack isn’t making a triumphant return on the Echo Pop, so there’s no wiring this into a more powerful speaker system when you want a big music upgrade. The speaker driver in this model is a tad bigger (1.95 inches) than the earlier Echo Dot’s (1.73 inches). However, it’s not necessarily better (no side-by-side testing here, unfortunately), and neither can hold a candle to the three-speaker arrangement in the standard Echo. The Echo Pop continues to support Bluetooth for connecting to a secondary speaker, at least.
Adding to the Echo Pop’s wireless chops is continued support for mesh networking extension withEero Wi-Fi networks. It’s an ostensibly nifty feature if you have an Eero setup and want just a little extra coverage for some basic web connectivity. Still, it only has 100Mbps of bandwidth to share out to a maximum of 10 devices, so it won’t replace a proper Eero unit as the backbone of your mesh network.
The Echo Pop can also joinAmazon’s Sidewalknetwork, which links Amazon devices together into a sort of external mesh network to keep them all connected if they lose their primary internet access — a feature I and some of my Android Police colleagues are not keen on enabling but which requires an opt-out (fortunately, that option is presented during setup).
Perhaps what’s more important than the hardware included in the Echo Pop is what’s missing. Amazon stripped the temperature and motion sensors out to make the Echo Pop. Those sensors enabled extra automations for the Echo Dot that make for a much smarter device. And the Echo Dot with Clock goes even further with an LED face that can display time, temperature, and more at a glance.
The Echo Pop is a decent little guy when it comes to sound. It pushes out plenty of volume for a 100-square-foot room and even plugs along brightly on a balcony where it contends with road noise. It strikes a strong balance at its middle volumes — think 25-75%.
At max volume, it’s not only too loud for a small space, but also a bit grating. Pushing max volume introduces some unwanted ducking to the audio in some music as extra loud sounds suck the energy out of other parts of the mix. Fortunately, the mics do a great job hearing the Alexa command word even over blasting music, so it’s still easy to change the volume or stop playback.
It’s quick and convenient for pulling up a podcast or song, and the sound is reasonably well-rounded. Bass is present if not driving, and the mids and treble are bright and clear. It will do the trick for a little midday pump-up with your favorite jams. But if you want to really party, you’ll be looking elsewhere or trying to pair it with another Echo device to double up the sound.
Software and features
The Echo Pop doesn’t so much have asoftware experienceas it just taps into all the back-end that comes with Amazon’s Alexa platform. The system starts with voice instructions in English, Spanish, and French, directing you to set it up through the Alexa app on your phone or tablet. It’s a quick and easy process to connect to the speaker and get it on your 2.4 GHz or 5GHz Wi-Fi network.
Once connected, most of the functionality comes from how you have Alexa set up. you may link it to various apps and accounts, such as a third-party calendar, so Alexa can tap into those. However, you’ll do this on your phone/tablet rather than asking Alexa to do it. If you tell Alexa to do something that’s not set up, it’ll prompt you to use the app and send you details in the app. That will show up in the “Activity” feed on the app’s homepage rather than as a pop-up notification somewhere — a detail I didn’t immediately pick up on.
Alexa has a great many smart home integrations, so there’s a good chance the products you’ve added to your home will have a way to work with the Echo Pop, though this model isn’t adding anything meaningful that wasn’t already present in the Echo Dot. you may also set Alexa up for the household with voice recognition, so it knows whose music to play or whose calendar to update with new entries. If you want to know more about all the smart features, you can find outeverything about Amazon Alexa here.
The competition
While the Echo Pop is the new, budget option, the older Echo Dot has common discounts that typically make it the cheaper option, frequently at $30 or less. While it may have a smaller speaker and a different design — aesthetics being a matter of personal preference — it has more functionality from its extra sensors while otherwise matching the Echo Pop just about everywhere else.
The standard Echo (4th Gen) has been kicking around since 2020, but it’s still a big upgrade option. While it retails for $100, that’s far from the price you’ll likely pay. Amazon constantly puts its Echo devices on sale, and the Echo (4th Gen) has seen numerous discounts cut it down to $60 and even $50. If you plan to listen to a lot of music on your speaker, the upgrade at that price will be well worth it.
The Echo Pop manages to steer clear of direct competition from Apple, which has only the $100HomePod Minianywhere close to it in price. TheGoogle Assistant-poweredNest Minicomes in at $50, so the Echo Pop stays below that by a decent margin. The deciding factor between the two will likely come down to your smart assistant preference.
TheJBL Link Portableis often on sale — currently $60 at the time of writing — and offers more. It has Google Assistant built-in, should have better sound, and can bring its sound on the go with an 8-hour battery life off its charging cradle and IPX7 protection against water.
Anyone more concerned with a decent speaker than with a smart assistant can look to any of the greatBluetooth speakersout there — more than a few offer major sound at affordable prices. Anker, Tribit, and Oontz have a good track record for good sound at low prices.
Should you buy it?
You can safely skip the Echo Pop unless it’sactuallycheaper than its Echo and Echo Dot siblings, and ideally considerably cheaper. If the Echo Dot is on sale below the Pop, it’s easily the better choice simply thanks to its extra functionality, and it could even be worth the extra smarts when it’s $10 more than the Echo Pop. If the Echo comes down to $50 again, it’s also a much better buy than the $40 Pop.
If you’re just looking to kit out a few extra rooms in your house with Alexa access points that occasionally serve passable audio, then the Echo Pop will do fine. It’s just not the best.
The Echo Pop is decent, but probably not the one to get unless you just need a few extra speakers around the house and the Echo Dot isn’t on sale.
