AmazonEcho Hub | 8” smart home control panel with Alexa | Compatible with thousands of devicesReducing CO2

Great smart home hub. Feels responsive and the screen looks great. The interface is clean and user friendly, and nice to not have ads like the echo show.Installation was simple. The hub wall bracket mounts straight only drywall, or even onto an existing single-gang box. For cleaner install, I used a Texas POE for power from a near by outlet (found this recommendation in another review). Otherwise you need to purchase a traditional POE that draws power from Ethernet, which I found difficult since I would have to route Ethernet into attic and down wall. Just routed electrical up the wall as if I was going to add a new outlet, but plugged this POE to the wires instead. The Texas POE fits right into a single-gang box, and even comes with wago type wire nuts to hook up to the electrical. This being AC to USB-c makes install much easier and accessible to most people who don’t have Ethernet already running in house or attic. Pro tip: purchase a 90 degree USB-c to usb-C cord so that the cable coming off the POE has a low profile as to not obstruct the tablet from being flush to the wall when installing.Overall, this is a great smart home hub for a satellite location in house where you want to add on screen control of thermostat or lights. We love it for our second floor in house.

There are many reviews high and low for this hub. What you intend on using it for is what you should be looking at. I have had an excellent experience with it so far, because I am using it as a second alarm control, control my lighting and quick view of my Ring cameras/answering the doorbell. It can handle media, music, etc, but that is not its primary use. It is quick and responsive when controlling all of my Ring products, very good at my lights and switches, and very good at locking/unlocking my doors. It works perfectly as a second alarm panel for my Ring alarm. It does a admirable job with my ecobee controlling the Hvac. It is also outstanding as a home intercom, assuming you have Amazon Echos set up in other rooms to drop in on. It is not so great for Amazon music, etc, just get an echo dot for that. It is also not really good to use for video streaming... Yes, it can do that with it, but it begins to lag a bit when it does. This is not a tablet either, as it does need to remain plugged in, so if that is what you are expecting, look at a fire tablet.If you want a device to function as a hub for smart home devices to quickly control, plus need a 2nd Ring alarm panel, THIS IS IT! If you are looking for a media controller, you probably need a fire tablet.It has been excellent for me, was easy to set up and use. I also used a wall wire phish tool to get the USB cord through the wall to keep it looking sharp.

I generally really like the Echo Hub. As others have said, it's not an Echo Show, but a smart home center that can pull your cameras, Ring Alarms, Ring keypads, lights, switches, and other smart devices into a nice wall-mounted panel that offers convenience apart from your phone. It's meant to be set up, customized, and left alone. It's not meant to watch TV or interact with like a Show. I have one for each floor of a three-story house and another in our primary bedroom. Three are powered by the 12-volt wire that was already in the wall from our old security system, and one is powered by splitting off the PoE of an already existing in-wall ethernet port in the adjacent room.The Black Friday sale made these much more palatable at just over $100 each and I made my own fast-charging power adapters for just under $6 each. This is my biggest complaint with the Echo Hub. They aren't really PoE compliant or ready since they don't have an ethernet port and they don't just require a Power Delivery (PD) adapter like Amazon states. They require a PD3.0 or PD3.1 adapter that optionally supports Programmable Power Supply (PPS). After a couple of weeks of trial and error I made four power adapters from AITRIP PD65W Fast Charging Type-C USB modules that provided the proper PPS power. I added a REVODATA Gigabit PoE Splitter ($13 additional) to power one of them with 12-volts and 2-amps (24 watt) while maintaining the ethernet data port in the adjacent room. The Hubs look professionally installed since all the power connections are completely hidden in the wall.I also bought the Hubs for Thread and Matter support of window shades. Unfortunately, they didn't play nicely with other Echo's nearby, so I disconnected them. Thread connections are much more stable now. However, the shade motors will sometimes flash that they have disconnected. They usually reconnect but will occasionally become unresponsive and show as such in the Alexa app. Thread simply isn't ready for primetime. At least I have new Hub border routers and a several Thread shades to test software update stability. I wish I could talk to a second-tier engineer instead of getting canned responses from Amazon. Oh well.I didn't give 5-stars to the Echo Hub. There are more issues, mostly minor, than just the power and Thread issues.1. The interface is SLOW. It needs more horsepower to be more responsive!2. I think the Hubs looks pretty nice on the wall but could be more modern looking by being thinner and having smaller bezels.3. One of the four Hubs shipped with a faulty power adapter that gave a startup error as many others have mentioned.4. I find the brightness of the screen to be very difficult to precisely control. The Hub tries too hard to be "smart". Why not allow the user to set the exact lowest and highest brightness settings?5. The proximity sensor works well, but I turned it off because the only option to allow the screen to toggle back to the main clock interface takes 10 minutes and can't be adjusted. WTH? The Hubs are wall-mounted in the highest traffic areas to make them accessible, especially for disarming the Ring alarms. The clock and background images almost never show when proximity is turned on since someone is almost always passing by.