The Amazon Echo Show 5 helps Alexa fit nicely on your nightstand

[MUSIC] This is the Amazon Echo show 5. It's Amazon's entry level smart display. It costs 90 bucks and it just got here this morning. I'm excited to pop it open and see what it can do. It's a pretty important product for Amazon. Google's actually been winning as far as the smart display battlefield. The Nest hub is great. They have a Lenovo smart clock. That's great. And the echo show good but a little clunky. Now, they're taking this one and they're combining the best Stuff on the Lenovo Smart clock with the nest tab we just got it in so we gonna take it out of the box and take a look. [MUSIC] So let's open, [MUSIC] It is much smaller than Amazon's other smart displays. Look at this, so it actually has of somewhat similar shape and design, so it's called the Amazon [UNKNOWN] show 5. Not because it's the fifth Echo show as you might intuitively believe, but because it has a 5.5 inch touchscreen. Now one of my questions about this is,if the touchscreen is going to be big enough, to make watching videos and looking at pictures worthwhile?You can do that on this screen, but is it gonna be an enjoyable experience, That's something we're going to have to find out. So I'm going to load this into my car, obviously that will be a laborious task and I'm going to take it to the CNet smart home where I'm going to get testing because there's not much more I can find out about this thing here, you know? I need to plug it in and get rolling. So we brought this thing to the CNET's Smart Home plugged it in. For the basics. It works a lot like an Amazon Echo smart speaker. You can give it all kinds of voice commands and then it has a touchscreen similar to previous Amazon Echo shows. One of the first things I noticed about this compared to say the Google Nest Hub is that you do a lot of the setup and you do the customization right from the device itself. From setting Setting up Wi-Fi from picking your home screen, you have this really detailed settings menu, right in here, whereas, with the Nest Hub, you do that in the Google Home app. SO, it's a bit more of a self-sufficient device. One of the new things with the Echo Show 5 is this control panel, that you access Here from swiping right, you could access some of your smart home devices previously. But now you can access all of your routines and all of your devices and doing that allows you to see them by groups, see them by device. Types it's pretty cool. That's something I prefer the nest hubs room by room organization and their shortcut control panel. But we're talking about personal preferences here. The echoes show 5 has definitely made improvements on this front. Other things to know here. These show 5 has a three point five millimeter output jack. So you can connect it to your own sound system. The camera that you use to make video calls you can now cover with a physical shutter which is handy for a device that you might want to put next to your bed. You can check on the footage of a variety of smart home cams Including the Ring Video Doorbell. And if someone's at your door, you can actually answer it right from the Show 5 and talk to the person and tell them to drop off the package. One of the coolest new features of the Show 5 is a sunrise alarm. 15 minutes before your scheduled time, the screen will start getting brighter with a sunrise animation to ease you out of your sleep. Weirdly this only works on alarms between 4 AM and 9 AM so if you work the night shift, you're out of luck. Okay, so I've gotten a chance to spend some time with the Show 5 at this point and I'm seeing how some of these features stack up. In particular this ambient light feature. So Amazon talked about how they're rolling out a new Ambient sensor here and obviously they're trying to stack up to what the nest hub does with photos. So the nest hub has this sensor that adapts both to brightness and the warmth so that when you're scrolling through as your screen saver or your ambient mode It looks like a physical photo in a room, it's one of our favorite features of the Nest hub. And so the Amazon Echo Show 5 is obviously trying to replicate that to an extent. It is cool, you can put a little bit more photos on the Show 5. But as you can see clearly, it's not quite as adaptive. It doesn't respond with the same level of dexterity as the nest hub. The echo five actually has better mics than the nest tub. It heard me more clearly from a distance and more over background noise. But the nest hub still better at walking you through recipes. It breaks down the steps and scrolls through them more fluidly while keeping more of the info you need front and center on the screen. If you need a place to eat, the nest hub can show you directions and the show five Kant's. If you want to watch videos, the NES club has access to a little streaming site known as YouTube. The [UNKNOWN] show 5 doesn't at least snap with voice commands, one of the ways that the full size [UNKNOWN] show was better than the Google [UNKNOWN] tab was sound quality, it was bigger and it sounded like it but now the [UNKNOWN] show 5 is obviously much smaller, so can it still keep up or even beat the Google tab when playing music? Yes or no? Take a listen. [MUSIC] [MUSIC] [MUSIC] Even when they're set to the same volume you can hear that the Show 5 is a little bit louder than the Nest Hub. That's because it's artificially boosting its sound by raising up the acoustic and the base levels. That makes it sound really good on acoustic tracks. What makes the Nest Hub sound a little bit clearer on more complex tracks the Show5 is also going to distort just a little bit at high volumes especially on those complex tracks but for most that you're gonna be listening to the Show5 will probably edge out the Nest Hub just barely. I've got a few neat pics about the Show5 2 I wish you could see your voice commands spelled out at the top as you can on the Nest Hub. These bessels on the side when you're watching a video will make a small picture even smaller. You can't customize snooze times. The screen is a little too bright for a dark room. Amazon introduced some how to videos for the Show 5 from Wiki How. Which are cool, but they're just the intro videos. Which aren't enough. If you're trying to complete a complex task. So I have plenty of gripes and complaints. And I don't think the Amazon Echo Show five is as good as the [UNKNOWN], but it's still pretty good. I like this cute little guy, and honestly, if you have to pick one for your bedroom I would recommend the $90 Amazon ecoshop five over the $130 Google netstop. Is a good smarter display plus a good smart alarm clock. But overall. The netstop is still better. Amazon made a lot of improvement here especially over their older smart displays. And the Echo Show 5 is an interesting alternative from the Google Nest Hub even if it's not quite better.