Amazon Echo Show review

Setup is exactly what you'd expect from Amazon — sign in with your existing account in the Alexa app, scan a code, and the device walks itself through Wi-Fi, room assignment, and household members. It's polished, it's quick, and it inherits anything Alexa already knew about your home, so smart bulbs, thermostats and routines were live within minutes.

Hardware-wise, the 15.6" Full HD panel feels well-built and the included tilt stand or wall bracket gives you reasonable flexibility. There's a physical camera shutter and a mic-mute switch, which is the kind of detail that makes putting it in a kitchen easier to live with.

As an always-on hub, the Echo Show 15 is genuinely brilliant. Full Alexa voice control means timers, music, lights and shopping lists are a sentence away, and the Zigbee/Matter-capable models double as a smart-home hub so you don't need a separate bridge. Drop-in video calls to other Echo devices are great for shouting up the stairs, and recipe step-throughs from Allrecipes and Food Network feel built for the kitchen.

Entertainment is the unsung strength. Prime Video, Netflix, Hulu, and music from Amazon Music, Spotify, Apple Music and TuneIn all run natively. It's not a TV, but as a 'play something while I cook' screen it earns its place on the wall without any extra effort.

This is where the story softens. The calendar lives as one widget among many on the home screen, and while it'll show your week at a glance, it never feels like the main event the way a dedicated wall calendar does. Family members can each link their own calendars through the Alexa app, which is genuinely useful, but the widget itself is small enough that reading it from across the kitchen takes effort.

Sync support also has gaps. Google Calendar, Outlook and Apple iCloud can be linked, but Apple in particular has historically been the most limited of the three and can lag on two-way updates. If multiple calendars per person and color-coded household views are the reason you're buying a display, this isn't the one.

The Echo Show 15 requires an Amazon account, and the home screen rotates Amazon-flavoured suggestions — recently watched Prime titles, products, deals — alongside your widgets. You can quieten a lot of it in settings, but you can't fully strip it out. For some households that's noise; for households already deep in Prime, it's just the device showing you things you'd open anyway.

There's also the wider question of having an Amazon mic and camera on the wall. The hardware controls help, and Alexa privacy settings have improved, but it's worth deciding up front whether you want that trade for everything the device gives you back.