Two new smart displays are on the way from Amazon, as better cameras rock up for more face-to-face from anywhere you leave them.
We’ve often said that the smart display is a good entry to the smart speaker world, but they came in all sorts of shapes and sizes. There are two main smart device types out there — those that run Google Assistant and those that run Amazon Alexa — and then there are the various sizes and what they bring to the table.
For instance, Google recently updated its mid-sized 7 inch Nest Hub smart display, and the focus is now not just on a small smart display, but one that can be used for sleep tracking.
And Amazon recently updated its 10 inch Echo Show smart display, but the focus is instead on video chat, complete with a camera that moves with you.
Amazon has been pushing more for video chat in the past year with its smart displays, but you typically needed to spend up to grab one. Yet in its recent release, that seems to be less of a thing.
This week, the new models are the Echo Show 8 and the Echo Show 5, two variations on a theme that shrink the smart display screen size down, but keep the technology very similar to what we saw in our Echo Show 10 review.
In the Echo Show 5, there’s a 5.5 inch screen as the name suggests, sporting an HD camera with a shutter to let you switch the camera off, while the 8 inch model updates the hardware to support a 13 megapixel camera for video chat. Both include microphones and let you talk to Alexa for routines and such, but the approach here is simply a smaller Echo Show 10 made for different households.
Both are also under the price of the nearly $400 Echo Show 10, seeing the 2021 Echo Show 8 for $199 and the 2021 Echo Show 5 for $119. Australians can expect to find both from Amazon in Australia later this month, and possibly select stores across the country.
