When I first saw Amazon’s latest Alexa-powered smart speaker, the $39.99 Echo Pop, the word “hilarious” came to mind. It looks fun and cute, and it makes me feel happy. After a few days of testing, the looks are the main reason I buy these over the $49.99 5th Gen Dot. No new features. In fact, with that $10 price drop, there are some losses. It also doesn’t sound as good as the Dot and doesn’t sound as good.
But if you need a smart speaker in a small room like your bathroom, laundry room, or guest room to listen to podcasts, control your smart home devices, or answer the occasional math question, the small size and colorful Pop is your best bet because it has a lot of options. It’s cheap and fits perfectly. For a large room in the house, the Echo Dot does more and sounds better for just $10 more.
The Echo Pop is a semi-circular smart speaker with three physical buttons (volume up and down and mute) and a barrel plug with a long white power cord attached to a 15-watt power brick. (Amazon has yet to adopt his USB-C to power his Echo smart speakers in-house.)
It has Amazon’s Alexa voice assistant built-in, along with things like streaming music, setting multiple timers, triggering Alexa routines, controlling connected smart home devices, playing silly games, and even telling silly jokes. you can do everything. It also works as a home intercom or telephone.
The Pop has all the same smart home radios as the Dot, but lacks some of the more advanced sensors.
The Pop is also the second speaker powered by Amazon’s AZ2 Neural Edge processor, enabling more local processing of voice commands and making requests like “What time is it?” It can “turn off the lights” faster than a non-AZ2 Echo. (The latest Echo Dots and Echo Show 15 smart displays also have it).
1/3
The Echo Pop is the cheapest of the Echo speakers, with a list price of $40. Like all Echo speakers, it’s likely to get a big price cut as part of Amazon’s strategy to bring smart voice assistants to every room in the house. But keep in mind that there are many attempts to sell you stuff on cheap hardware. While testing Pop, I set an alarm to upsell with a louder audible alarm.
Setting the alarm came with an upsell to make the alarm louder
But if you use Alexa, you know this, and if you’re good with Alexa, you probably want Alexa and its more useful and less intrusive features in every room (these features are For more info, check out my Echo Dot with Clock review).
Although only slightly smaller than the Echo Dot, the Pop’s flat surface fits well on a bookshelf or table. The addition of teal and purple color options in addition to black and white adds that cheery element that feels more like a design choice than a tech product in the room. And it looks much better than the ugly Echo Flex, Amazon’s previous attempt at a budget speaker to bring Alexa to every room.
Pop has all the same smart home radios as the Dot. It’s an extender for the Eero mesh Wi-Fi system, matter controller, and sidewalk bridge, but it lacks some of Dot’s more advanced sensors. There are no temperature sensors or ultrasonic motion detectors, and the tap-to-snooze accelerometer only works for alarms, not pausing and resuming music like the Dot. I also happened to discover that you can’t snooze or dismiss the alarm with a tap or voice if you don’t have an internet connection.
Echo Pop vs. Echo Dot
The biggest question, though, is if you want to buy a cheap Echo smart speaker, should you buy the Pop or the Dot? Now let’s see how the two stack up.
sound: The Echo Pop is great for listening to podcasts and radio, but it’s also fine for listening to music sitting right next to you in a small room. Combining the stereo with another pop is noticeably better. But this isn’t the device you buy to listen to hard-hitting tunes. The Dot doesn’t either, it actually has a smaller front emitting speaker but it has a richer sound and better bass so if you consider that the extra he spent the $10 please. Additionally, the dot allows you to tap it to pause the music immediately. Pop requires the use of voice commands.
If you already have a better Alexa speaker or a decent Bluetooth speaker, pairing the Pop with one of them will save you $10. However, neither the Pop nor the Dot have a 3.5mm audio jack. If you wanted to use wires to add voice control to dumb speakers, the 3rd Gen Dot was the cheapest option. However, Amazon has discontinued that model, so if you need that feature and can find it, get it. (The $100 4th generation Echo also has an audio jack).
Speed and Performance: Pop and Dot have the same AZ2 Neural Edge processor, so most commands run faster than the old Echo. But since the Dot has 4 mics and the Pop only has 3, the Dot reacts slightly faster and picks up my voice better from a distance. However, if you keep Pop on your desk or bedside table, you won’t notice a difference.
sensor: The lack of temperature and ultrasonic sensors makes the Pop less useful as a smart home controller. The 5th generation Echo Dot can use temperature sensors to smartly adjust his thermostat when the room is too hot, or turn on the lights with ultrasonic sensors when you walk into the room. Both pops and dots can be triggered. Alexa routines based on sound detection, such as a dog barking, running water, or someone snoring.
Size and shape: As I mentioned earlier, I prefer the look of pops over dots. Although only slightly smaller (3.9″ x 3.3″ x 3.6″ compared to 3.9″ x 3.9″ x 3.5″), the design fits better on desks and bedside tables. I’m a big fan of the new purple color too, but I’ve always been fascinated by purple products. Teal looks a little hazy, more gray than green, but more subdued than other dot he colors.
What is pop? Weirdly, the Pop doesn’t have the action buttons that almost every other Echo has. This allows you to call Alexa without saying your name. I actually use it a lot, but I was missing it here. The only Echo that doesn’t have it is the Echo Spot, a device that’s very similar in form factor (although it doesn’t have a screen or camera).
There is also no pop-up clock display option. My favorite Dot is the Echo Dot with Clock. It uses a dot-matrix display to show the time and other useful information. That’s not an option here, but Amazon has moved the location of the Alexa LED light from the bottom in a dot to the top where it appears as a small strip (you can adjust the brightness in the Alexa app).
should i buy it?
If you’re already obsessed with your Alexa-powered smart home, for a room or two that can’t justify spending $50 on another speaker (or can’t wait for Amazon’s frequent sales), Pop makes sense.
It’s also a good upgrade if you still own an older early-generation Echo, older than the 3rd generation that launched in 2018. It’s also worth upgrading from the 3rd generation if you don’t need the 3.5mm jack. Because pop is faster, sounds better, and looks a lot better. However, I don’t intend to replace the 4th or 5th gen Dot with a Pop because it would lose functionality.
The Echo (4th generation) is still my top pick for Echo speakers.
If you’re new to Amazon Alexa and want to try out the key features of this smart speaker, get Pop. $40 is a bargain for a piece of technology that can do everything a Pop can do. Also, if you’re looking to start adding smart devices to your home and are interested in the new Matter smart home standard, consider this. It’s the cheapest Matter controller you can buy, but it’s Wi-Fi only, so it won’t work with all Matter devices. For full Matter compatibility, you’ll need to upgrade to something that adds support for the Thread protocol, such as the larger Echo (4th gen).
The Echo (4th gen) is still my top pick for Echo speakers, and it sells for as low as $50. When it comes to choosing between the 4th generation Echo and the Echo Pop, there’s no contest. The Echo (4th Gen) doesn’t have Amazon’s latest processor yet, but it’s a great smart speaker and a more convenient smart home hub. It does everything the Dot can do, plus adds Zigbee and Thread compatibility, and sounds great.
Photo Credit: Jennifer Pattison Tuohy/The Verge
