VERDICT Better, louder audio with the same great design – the latest version of Amazon’s dinky speaker is another winner.
AMAZON HAS LONG been cheerfully ignoring the old maxim of ‘if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it’. The original Kindle still works perfectly well, but Amazon has honed the e-reader format into both the first and last words in the industry. And that’s what it’s doing now with the compact smart speaker, one device at a time.
Equally, the Echo Dot didn’t really need fixing, but Amazon did it anyway – twice now, in fact. This is the only Echo device to be on its third iteration, and the newest Echo Dot is a masterclass in making everything better without a price hike.
The Echo Dot costs £50 – the same as its predecessor – and that means that in terms of competition, there’s only one game in town: the Google Home Mini. This, however, lacks an audio output jack, unlike the Echo Dot, which has a 3.5mm auxiliary output. As a result, it’s in the peculiar position of being both Amazon’s entry-level smart speaker and a device that can connect to any other sound system, whether it costs £100 or £10,000.
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