Amazon Echo Pop

The Amazon Echo Pop is the smallest Echo we sell. It is a half sphere rather than a ball, and the speaker fires straight out of the flat face. Pick your colour above.

• What the Amazon Echo Pop is, and who it suits
• The speaker fires forwards, so point it at the room
• The smart home question, settled before you buy
• Three colours, and the fabric is the whole front
• What you need before it will work

What the Amazon Echo Pop is, and who it suits

Everything Alexa does with your voice, in the cheapest and smallest body Amazon builds it in. Music, radio, timers, alarms, reminders, questions, and switching the plugs, bulbs and switches you already own. It suits a bedroom, a desk, a shop counter, a spare room, or a second and third one dotted around a house that already has a larger Echo doing the heavy listening. At 196 grams and 99 millimetres across it will sit anywhere a coffee cup sits.

The speaker fires forwards, so point it at the room

This is the one placement rule worth knowing. A round Echo throws sound outwards in every direction and can go in a corner. The Pop is cut in half, and its 1.95 inch driver pushes the sound out of the flat face in one direction only. Turn that face towards where people sit and it sounds noticeably better than the same speaker turned towards a wall. On a shelf, aim it into the room rather than along it.

The smart home question, settled before you buy

The Pop is a Matter controller, so Matter devices and ordinary Wi-Fi devices answer to it directly. What it does not carry is a Zigbee radio. Zigbee bulbs, plugs and sensors still need a gateway, and buying this speaker will not save you that purchase. If your system is going to be built on Zigbee, either budget for a gateway or buy an Echo with the radio inside. Settle it now rather than after the sensors are on the wall.

Three colours, and the fabric is the whole front

Charcoal, glacier white and lavender bloom, chosen from the dropdown above. On this shape the fabric is not a detail, it is the entire face of the object and the only part of it anyone looks at, so the colour carries further here than it does on a device you look down at. Charcoal reads as a dark object and stops being noticed. Glacier white sits quietly against a white wall or a kitchen counter. Lavender bloom is the one that is meant to be seen.

What you need before it will work

A 2.4 or 5 GHz Wi-Fi network, an Amazon account, and a mains socket within reach of the supplied adapter. There is no battery in it, so it lives where the socket is. Ask us before you order which plug is in the box you are buying and we will check the carton rather than guess. Setup is done from the Alexa app on a phone, and the speaker is talking within a few minutes of being plugged in.

If you want a temperature sensor and a tap on the top, the Echo Dot is the next one up. If the Zigbee hub is what you are actually after, that is the Echo 4th Gen, and if music is the point of the purchase, the Echo Studio. Wikipedia explains the Matter standard and why it decides what a speaker like this can control.