Which Amazon Echo Model Is The Cheapest & What Features Is It Missing?

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More and more people want to turn their homes into smart homes, and one of the most economical and popular ways you can do that is with the help of an Amazon Echo. The company has a variety of different Echo products that are able to serve just about anyone's purposes and budgets. Some people don't have a lot of room for their smart home hub, or they just want to have auxiliary speakers in various parts of their home. Well, if you really want the smallest Echo that the company has to offer, you need to get yourself an Amazon Echo Pop.

At 99 mm wide, 91 mm tall, and 83 mm deep, the Echo Pop barely beats out the Echo Dot as Amazon's smallest smart speaker, which is 100 mm wide, 100 mm deep, and 89 mm tall. It's also surprisingly lighter than the Dot as well, weighing just 6.9 ounces compared to the Dot's 10.7 ounces. The one way that the Echo Pop is larger than the Dot is with its actual speaker area. It features a 1.95-inch front-firing speaker, a 0.22-inch size advantage. Because of its smaller size, the Echo Pop is the cheapest Echo model, costing you $39.99. However, as of this writing, the Echo Dot is two dollars cheaper with a limited-time deal when it's usually ten dollars more expensive. That $39.99 is the price for any of the four color options available: charcoal, glacier white, lavender bloom, and midnight teal. While the Echo Pop does a lot of what you want out of an Echo, its size does reduce the number of features it has compared to the other models.

The Amazon Echo Pop does most everything you could want out of an Amazon Echo device. It has Amazon's Alexa voice assistant built in, so you get all of the benefits of that service. This could be anything from setting alarms or telling you the weather to actually purchasing goods with your Amazon account. You can also use Amazon Music to play any of the music that you want. If you use another service like Spotify, you can connect that to your Alexa account through the Alexa app to play on your Echo Pop as well.

There isn't much that other Echoes can do that the Pop can't. In terms of its speaker, it merely has a front-facing speaker, whereas something like the standard Echo is a spherical shape that has a more omnidirectional output for its sounds. This small speaker obviously also features none of the video or visual features that you would get on any of the Echo Show devices, which would make this nearly useless to those who are deaf or hard of hearing.

Lastly, the one feature the Pop lacks is something that it shares with every other Echo device, and that is portability. Because it is so small, one would hope that you could pick it up and take it around with you like you would any other Bluetooth speaker, but for the Echo Pop to work, it needs to be plugged into an outlet. Amazon would rather you use this as a hub than an accessory, so unless price is your primary concern, maybe a larger hub would be a better fit for you.