Amazon Echo Show 15 review: Alexa’s on your wall

The original idea for Amazon’s Echo Show was a large screen-based device that would offer up relevant, glanceable information for the modern family, replacing outdated devices like bulletin boards, paper calendars, and sticky notes on the fridge. In 2017, Amazon couldn’t quite achieve that vision for a price that a modern family would be willing to pay. So, instead, it released a small, squat seven-inch touchscreen smart speaker that, frankly, did little more than Amazon’s screenless Echos. 

The $249.99 Echo Show 15 is billed as a shared hub for families to see things like upcoming calendar appointments, to-dos, digital sticky note reminders, and shopping lists. It’s also an excellent kitchen TV thanks to the addition of the Fire TV interface. Of course, it does everything other Echo displays and speakers do, thanks to the presence of Amazon’s smart voice assistant Alexa. This includes playing music, showing weather reports, streaming video, controlling smart home gadgets, and telling fart jokes — all of the stuff you’ve come to rely on Alexa for.

A very solid piece of hardware, the Echo Show 15 is a stunning device. It looks impressive on your wall when called into action and otherwise blends into the background as a digital photo frame displaying art or family photos. It fills a niche that no device has reliably conquered to date: a wall-mounted tablet to replace the plethora of analog paper tools busy households traditionally rely on to communicate with each other. You can use it on your countertop with an optional stand if you can find the room — at 15.8 x 9.9 x 1.4 inches, this thing is huge — but the wall is the better option.

The concept is good. But the execution is underwhelming in places. As is a theme with Amazon devices, on day one, there was plenty of room for improvement on the software front. There’s a lot crammed onto this admittedly large screen, but ultimately, while the Echo Show 15 tries to be something for everyone, it ends up struggling to be particularly useful for anyone.

The addition of Fire TV and the updated Photo Frame feature (which turns the entire display into a digital picture frame) since launch have significantly improved the device. You can read my full thoughts on the Fire TV experience here. But there are still areas for improvement. (Namely, the widgets, which I’ll get to.)

The Echo Show 15 is a 15.6-inch screen with a 1080p touch display, with the power of the new Amazon AZ2 neural edge processor behind it — the first Show to use Amazon’s latest chip. While it’s noticeably snappier than others in the family, it’s not super responsive and takes two or three seconds to respond to taps and swipes.

A new homescreen layout divides its time between the standard rotating Echo Show content (which you can customize) and a new feature: widgets. You can also have it just display art or photos (stored in Amazon Photos or Facebook, nowhere else, sadly), fulfilling its picture frame ambitions.

Aesthetically, the Echo Show has a black frame with a white mat, resembling a standard picture frame. Tech-wise it looks like the Samsung Frame TV and the Facebook Portal had a baby.

It comes in one color, and you can’t change the familiar Alexa blue background behind the widgets — I’d like to see some customization options all around. Two 1.6 speakers on either side (or top and bottom in portrait) provide decent if slightly tinny sound, and a small row of buttons on the top or side (depending on orientation) offer volume up / down, mute, and camera shutter controls.

The widget concept is a nice addition, and the potential is huge — especially as Amazon has released an API that developers can use to add widgets to their Alexa skills. When I first tested the device, there were a dozen or so Amazon widgets that were limited in their usefulness.

They include calendar and reminders (you can import calendars from Google, Apple, and Microsoft), shopping list, sticky notes, smart home controls, a to-do list (Alexa only), weather, your commute, photos, maps, music and audio, reorder suggestions, Alexa suggestions, and your Amazon deliveries. A “What to Eat” option offers up recipes and nearby delivery suggestions from partners such as Domino’s and Whole Foods.

In our app-driven world, you likely already have favorite tools that do most of these things, and frustratingly, you can’t port any of them to the Show. It’s mainly Amazon for now. A few developers have jumped on board in the last 12 months. There’s a Big Sky weather widget, one from The Daily Show, and an Ambient Visions widget that turns your Show display into video of Christmas scenes, a roaring fireplace, a tropical beach, a mountain lake, or — my favorite — an aquarium complete with sound effects. The Magic 8 Ball widget has been the most useful one in my household.

But the widgets are limited in terms of customization. While you can rearrange and resize some, if you have any enabled, they take up almost half of the screen. Interestingly, the widgets take the Show from being a voice-first device (which is something I’ve always struggled with) to one with a lot more touch functionality. It’s the most tactile Show to date, and the widgets invite you to come on in and stay awhile as you check your calendar, browse shows to watch, and attempt to control your smart home from the (limited) Smart Home widget (more on this later).

While the Show 15 is designed as a hub for family organization, it is not a great communication device. My biggest disappointment here is its 5-megapixel camera, which produced pixelated blown-out images during my Alexa calling and Drop-In testing. (Zoom is not supported). Despite the souped-up processor, video constantly freezes and lags, making it unusable for an actual conversation. It also doesn’t have the auto-framing of its Echo Show 8 and Show 10 counterparts, both of which have a more robust 13-megapixel camera. 

It seems Amazon was looking for a differentiator from the Show 10, which Amazon tells me is its “communication device.” The rotating 10 can follow you around a room while you talk, keeping you in the frame as you chop veggies or unload the dishwasher. But who really is going to have a Show 10 and a Show 15 in their kitchen? Two $250 devices in one room seems like legitimate overkill. If they had bumped up the camera in the 15 to make video calling better, this would be a more useful device. 

The best feature of the Show 15 is its size. To date, screens for the kitchen have either been too large (see GE Appliances’ monstrous screen built into an over-the-range hood) or too inflexible (Samsung’s Family Hub fridge with a portrait tablet built-in). The Show 15, like Goldilocks’ proverbial porridge, is just right — at least in terms of size.

The 15.6-inch screen’s housing is just shy of 10 inches tall and 16 inches wide and is designed to fit under standard kitchen cabinets or between two doorways in an open plan house, Chris Green, VP of industrial design at Amazon Lab126, tells me. It’s also very flexible. You can mount it on the wall in either a portrait or landscape orientation, and thanks to the included cleverly designed mount, it’s easy to swap it from one to the other when your use case changes.

A compelling reason to buy this is for a good-quality compact screen for watching TV while in the kitchen. It’s the first and only Echo Show to support a full Fire TV interface, which includes Netflix, Prime Video, Hulu, Disney Plus, HBO Max, Sling TV, YouTube TV, Paramount, Peacock, and YouTube and YouTube Kids, to name a few.

One downside, however, is that the 16:9 ratio of the screen means you get two black bars when watching widescreen movies. The white picture frame design also doesn’t lend itself to immersive viewing. You also have to use an onscreen remote to navigate most of the Fire TV apps (other than the main interface and Prime Video). You can pair it with an Alexa Voice Remote (third-gen), which is definitely better than using the on-screen remote, but still an odd move for a touchscreen smart display. Of course, as this is an Alexa device, voice is by far the best way to control it, and you can ask for content by app, show, live TV channel, etc.

Another feature that takes advantage of the bigger screen is picture-in-picture. You can view a security camera feed or video doorbell while also looking at other content. So, you could have a baby monitor running while you’re following a recipe. The Show can stream video from any Alexa-compatible camera. If you have a compatible video doorbell, it will also pop up a live feed on the screen when someone rings the bell, and you can talk to them through the device. 

In my testing, I initially assumed I’d want it in the landscape orientation — and for TV viewing, that was the best option. But for the family hub features — shopping lists, calendars, and even widget use — it was more helpful in portrait, as you see more information on the screen. This was especially true for smart home control. And while you can’t pin a full-screen widget (it always reverts to the homescreen), the full-size portrait smart home widget shows 12 separate tiles for your devices compared to just six or seven in the landscape. Frustratingly, you only get individual devices to control in the widget (no groups), but in the full-screen mode, you do get the option to use groups.

Setting up the Show is an easy process; once powered on, you walk through a series of screens to connect to Wi-Fi and accept Amazon’s litany of terms and agreements. New here is the option to add Visual ID. (Voice ID and enabling Amazon Sidewalk may also be new to you if you haven’t set up a Show in a while.)

These are all optional, but the Visual ID — a new feature that leverages that AZ2 processor — uses the camera to serve up relevant content, such as calendar appointments, commute times, and notes from family members, depending on who is standing in front of it. It can even be used to gate content to kid-safe things if you set it up to recognize a child. 

This is great in theory, but in my testing, it was spotty, sometimes misidentifying family members and often taking a long time to see anyone. Amazon says the processing for the Visual ID happens locally, and the identifying information is stored on the Echo Show 15 itself, not in the cloud. The facial profiles aren’t shared across devices, so you need to set it up with each Echo Show 15.

I ran into some issues setting up Visual ID and its companion feature, Voice ID, for my family members, specifically my children. If you have Amazon Kids profiles set up already, you just tap on those in your account settings and walk through the process. I had no problems setting up my daughter’s Voice and Visual ID, but when it came to my son, the Show kept thinking he was my daughter. He was not amused. After the third time Alexa recognized him as a 10-year-old girl, he was done with the whole thing. 

I’d advise setting up the device first and trying it out in a couple of locations before committing to a wall mount, although that was my preference. The wall mount option is nowhere near as daunting as I’d anticipated. Amazon provides a paper template, and you’ll want to break out a level and a drill, but it’s mostly painless and not much more work than hanging a large picture or artwork on the wall. Drill holes for four screws, attach the wall mount, and you’re done. The Show slides onto the mount thanks to four grooves in the back, and you can switch between portrait and landscape at will without having to re-drill anything.

A tabletop stand sold separately for $30 doesn’t offer as much flexibility (you need a screwdriver to reconfigure the orientation). For $40, there’s an option that will let you change from portrait to landscape without having to break out a screwdriver. An under-cabinet mount for $50 lets you tilt and swivel. I tested the $30 stand, and it’s solid and well-made but very large. The footprint this thing takes up on a countertop (289 square inches in our test setting) is too big for a lot of kitchens.

The biggest issue with wall mounting is going to be cable management. If you’re okay with a cord going down your wall and you have a nearby outlet, you’re all set. But if you’re like me, you are going to want to route this through the wall or devise another way to hide the cable. Amazon’s Green tells me that snaking the cable through the wall as you might with a TV is perfectly fine, but you know — at your own risk and endeavor. 

The Show 15 comes with a five-foot cable, potentially making placement tricky. (A six-foot extension cord is available for $13.) I had nowhere in my kitchen to wall mount this, as all my walls are tiled except for one corner of the room that would have made the perfect spot, but there was no outlet anywhere nearby. I ended up placing it in portrait mode in a main hallway that we use to come in and out of the house. While we sacrifice the TV aspect this way, it’s actually a more useful place for some of those visual reminders, and I have the lights for the three closest rooms set up on the smart home widget.

Speaking of the smart home side, it’s a bit of a disappointment. There’s no Zigbee radio built in for connecting devices, and the three or four individual controls you can access from the smart home widget limit its usefulness for managing your connected home. You can’t pin the full-screen smart home control to the display; it will always revert to the homepage. Tapping the widget doesn’t always take you to the full screen; the only reliable way is to swipe down and tap the Smart Home button from the menu. I couldn’t even get a voice command to bring it up. It was not designed with the smart home front of mind. It will, however, be a Matter controller when Amazon updates its devices to support the new smart home standard.

However, smart home is clearly not the primary use case; it's designed as tool for household organization. But only if you are all in on Amazon for your shopping, reminders, and to-do lists.

If you’ve been wanting a wall-mounted smart display, this is really your only ready-to-use option and will be a great addition to your kitchen if you’re happy with the limited ecosystem. The Fire TV and improved photo frame modes make this the best Echo smart display out there (although I wish the photo frame could stay live for longer than three hours). But if you like using services outside of Amazon for your family management, you’ll want to wait and see what other widgets third-party developers come up with before picking one up.

Update December 16th, 9:25AM: This review was originally published in December 2021. We have updated it to reflect new features and functionality, such as the Fire TV mode.