Amazon Echo Plus

The Amazon Echo Plus is the cylinder Echo with the smart home hub inside it. That is the whole point: a Zigbee hub is built in, so Zigbee bulbs, plugs and sensors pair straight to the speaker and you buy no gateway at all.

• What the Amazon Echo Plus is actually for
• The temperature sensor is the underrated part
• The same 360 degree cabinet
• Zigbee, and not Matter or Thread
• The rest of it

What the Amazon Echo Plus is actually for

It is the cylinder Echo with the gateway built into it. Zigbee bulbs, plugs and sensors pair straight to the speaker, so the box on the shelf, the power supply for it and the second app all disappear. If your smart home is going to be mostly Zigbee, this collapses two purchases into one, and it is the reason to pay the difference over the plain cylinder.

The temperature sensor is the underrated part

There is a thermometer inside. A routine can start a fan or an air conditioner once the room passes a temperature you set, with no separate sensor bought, mounted or kept in batteries. In a climate where the useful rule is almost always about heat, having the trigger already sitting in the sitting room is worth more than it sounds on a specification sheet.

The same 360 degree cabinet

A 3 inch woofer and a 0.8 inch tweeter firing out in every direction, with Dolby processing. No front to sit in front of, so a corner, a counter or a table people walk around all work equally. It is the shape that suits a room in use rather than a listening position.

Zigbee, and not Matter or Thread

Worth being precise about, because the newer sphere is different. The hub in this one is Zigbee. It is not a Matter controller and there is no Thread radio in it. For Zigbee sensors and bulbs, which is most of what needs a gateway in this shop, that is exactly what you need. If you specifically want Matter and Thread, the 4th generation Echo is the one to look at.

The rest of it

A 3.5 mm socket does line in and line out, so it will feed an amplifier or take a turntable. One button cuts the microphones electrically. It joins the multi room group with any other Echo, and Bluetooth works in both directions.

Pair it with the Zigbee door sensor or a Zigbee motion sensor and no gateway is needed at all. For Matter and Thread as well, see the Echo 4th Gen. Wikipedia has a plain explanation of Zigbee.