Amazon Echo Show 21 (newest gen), A stunning 21" smart display with built-in Fire TV, powerful vibrant sound, immersive HD streaming, with Alexa+ Early Access

This newest generation smart display features a stunning, 15.6-inch screen that makes a fantastic addition to a kitchen or living room. I opted to pair it with the premium stand, allowing it to sit neatly on a worktop rather than being wall-mounted. The unit delivers a sharp, vibrant picture alongside surprisingly good sound quality, making it a good hub for watching shows, managing a smart home or displaying family photos. The user interface is intuitive and easy to navigate, whether you are swiping or using Alexa to browse the built-in Fire TV streaming platforms. The addition of the new processor makes transitions smooth and the device responds quickly to vocal commands. Having it on the dedicated stand also makes it easy to reposition to where you are working in the room, ensuring the display is always comfortable to view. It is good quality and value for money for a premium hub. The reliable smart features and crisp display make it a great choice for entertainment and a useful gift to help organise a busy household.

I’ve used various smart displays over the years, but the Echo Show 15 is on a completely different level. The first thing that stands out is the size of the screen – it’s large enough to be genuinely useful rather than just a glorified clock. I’ve mounted mine under a kitchen cabinet and it fits perfectly, making excellent use of what would otherwise be wasted space. The range of widgets available is impressive and allows you to customise the display exactly how you want it. Whether it’s calendars, reminders, weather, shopping lists or smart home controls, everything is easy to see at a glance. Entertainment options are excellent too. All the major apps you’d expect are available, including Netflix and Apple TV, and having access to live TV is a real bonus when cooking or spending time in the kitchen. Sound quality is surprisingly good for a device of this type, with clear vocals and enough volume to comfortably fill the room. It also links seamlessly to your preferred music streaming service, making it ideal for listening to playlists, podcasts or radio stations throughout the day. Where the Echo Show 15 really shines is as a smart home control centre. I’ve connected it to my Ring devices and several other cameras around the house, and being able to view all of them from one screen is incredibly convenient. Checking who’s at the door or keeping an eye on different areas of the property takes just a glance. A nice touch is the included frame, which helps the device blend into the room rather than looking like a piece of technology stuck on the wall. It gives it a much more subtle, picture-frame appearance and makes it feel far less intrusive in a family living space. Installation was also refreshingly straightforward. The wall bracket is well designed, the mounting process is simple, and the supplied stencil makes positioning and drilling the fixing holes quick and accurate. Overall, this is far more than just a smart display. It’s an entertainment centre, family organiser, smart home dashboard and security monitor all rolled into one. If you’re already invested in the Alexa systems, the Echo Show 15 is an easy recommendation and one of the most useful smart home devices I’ve owned.

A little fiddly to customise as you would like but well worth the effort.

The Amazon Echo Show 15 has honestly become one of the most useful devices in our house. From the moment it was set up on the wall, it felt less like a gadget and more like a practical part of everyday life. The first thing that stands out is the large 15-inch screen. It’s bright, clear and easy to see from across the room. Because of its size, it works perfectly as a kind of digital noticeboard for the whole household. The layout with widgets is brilliant – you can see the weather, calendar, reminders and shopping lists all in one place. It’s incredibly convenient, especially in a busy home where everyone needs quick access to information. Another great feature is how naturally it fits into daily routines. With Alexa voice control, it’s easy to ask for the weather, set timers while cooking, play music, or check something quickly without needing to pick up a phone. It’s surprisingly helpful during the day – especially in the kitchen when your hands are busy. One of my favourite things about the Echo Show 15 is that it also doubles as entertainment. You can watch videos, follow recipes, or even stream shows thanks to the built-in Fire TV features. The screen is large enough that watching something while cooking or relaxing in the room actually feels comfortable, not cramped like on smaller displays. I also love using it as a digital photo frame. When it’s not actively being used, it shows family photos on the screen, and it genuinely looks beautiful on the wall. It adds a very warm and personal feeling to the room instead of looking like just another piece of technology. The wall-mounted design is another clever touch. It saves space on worktops and makes the device feel more like part of the home rather than something temporary sitting on a table. Overall, the Amazon Echo Show 15 is a brilliant combination of practicality, organisation and entertainment. It keeps the household connected, helps with everyday tasks and looks great while doing it. It’s quickly become one of those things you don’t realise you needed until you have it – and then you wonder how you ever managed without it.

Have owned Echo Shows of various sizes and this 15.6" unit is nice especially for use in the kitchen. The unit occasionally plays up and needs powering off to reset but is good. Wish it has a BBC iplayer app.

I bought this Echo as a present for my great-niece as she'd seen mine and she loved it. She's put it up now and her kids love it as well, my great-great-grandchildren. Good responsiveness and very good quality. Sound quality is absolutely superb. She loves its display and it looks brilliant on the wall. It keeps the children quiet as well, which is a plus. The other thing is I got it very cheap and on instalments because otherwise it would have been an expensive present, but I didn't mind paying for it because she's worth it and it's something she wanted.

The Echo Show 21 has some genuinely impressive hardware. The large display is excellent, the device is remarkably slim, and mounted on the wall it can genuinely look more like a piece of framed art than a conventional smart display. Sound quality is also very good. Unfortunately, after living with it, I have found the software experience so frustrating and unreliable that, knowing what I know now, I would not buy it again. The biggest problem is that the Echo Show 21 simply does not feel like a polished premium device. For something this expensive, there are far too many bugs, unexplained failures and basic functions that either work inconsistently or have stopped working altogether. 1. "Sorry, something went wrong" — over and over again For the last several weeks, the single most irritating problem has been Alexa randomly responding: "Sorry, something went wrong." This happens when I give ordinary commands, such as turning smart-home devices on or off, or asking Alexa to perform other routine tasks. What makes it even more frustrating is that Alexa suddenly switches to her default voice — the same behaviour you get when it appears that the device has lost contact with Amazon's servers. My Wi-Fi is not the problem. The router is approximately two metres away from the Echo Show 21, and every other device connected to my network works perfectly without any connectivity issues. Often, I have to repeat the same command several times before Alexa finally responds in the voice I have selected and actually performs the requested action. It is extremely frustrating. And the most ridiculous part is that Alexa tells me something went wrong but gives absolutely no indication of what went wrong. At other times, it is even stranger: Alexa clearly hears me — you can see that the device has detected my voice — but then she simply does nothing. No response, no explanation, no action. Just silence. Alexa+ was supposed to make Alexa smarter. At the moment, however, the experience often feels anything but intelligent. 2. YouTube control has become worse, not better One of the things that previously worked surprisingly well was voice control of YouTube. I used to be able to ask Alexa to search for a video, choose which result I wanted to watch, pause it and then resume playback later. Those controls no longer work properly. I reported the problem to Amazon Customer Service, but nothing they did resolved it. Amazon even replaced my Echo Show 21 with another unit, yet the replacement behaves exactly the same way. There is also an incredibly annoying playback bug. If I manually pause a YouTube video using the remote control — for example, because I am going to the kitchen or answering something on my phone — the video may simply start playing again by itself for no apparent reason. I can come back after quite some time only to discover that the video I was watching has already finished and YouTube has moved on to something else. I then have no idea where I originally stopped watching. That is absurd for a device designed to be used as a media display. 3. All my apps disappeared — twice Twice, every installed app disappeared from the home screen. The empty spaces where the apps had previously been were still there, but the applications themselves had vanished. The only way I found to fix the problem was to perform a factory reset — twice. Having to reset an expensive smart display to factory settings because all of its apps disappear from the home screen is not something that should happen in a polished consumer product. 4. Alexa ignores my preferred music service I have an Apple Music subscription and Apple Music is configured as my default music service. Yet when I ask Alexa to play a particular song or artist, she sometimes starts playing something through Amazon Music instead. I do not have an Amazon Music subscription, so I then get adverts. Why should Alexa ignore the music service I have explicitly selected as my default and send me to a service I do not subscribe to? It is another example of the device behaving in a way that makes the experience unnecessarily irritating. 5. No proper way to keep the screen off at night This is another feature that makes absolutely no sense to me. There is no proper option to keep the screen completely off while still being able to use Alexa normally. If you have an Echo Show 21 in the bedroom and say something to Alexa during the night, the enormous display suddenly lights up and illuminates the entire room. And it does not immediately go dark again. The screen can remain illuminated for quite a while, even though you have already finished speaking to the device. This happens despite having the display configured to dim or turn off automatically when the room is dark. So why can't I simply set an alarm, ask about tomorrow's weather, or turn a light or another smart-home device on or off without the entire 21-inch screen lighting up in the middle of the night? It makes no sense. 6. Talking to Alexa unnecessarily interrupts YouTube Another extremely annoying behaviour is that if I am watching something on YouTube and speak to Alexa, the device interrupts my video. Worse still, playback can remain interrupted long after I have finished speaking. Why can't Alexa simply answer my question or perform a command without unnecessarily stopping the video? And the situation becomes even more ridiculous when I ask Alexa to resume the video. Instead of understanding that she has just interrupted YouTube, she may ask: "What would you like to play?" In other words, she apparently has no awareness that she was the reason the video stopped and now tries to search for something completely new. This is supposed to be Alexa+, an allegedly more intelligent Alexa experience. Yet sometimes the behaviour feels remarkably unintelligent. 7. The lack of Polish language support is genuinely baffling Perhaps the most astonishing thing about Alexa is that Polish is still not supported as an Alexa language. And this is particularly difficult to understand given Alexa's history. Amazon acquired IVONA Software, a Polish text-to-speech company based in Gdańsk, whose technology became an important part of the development of Alexa's voice technology. Yet Alexa still does not offer Polish as a supported voice-assistant language. This is especially strange because Amazon already has Polish text-to-speech technology within its own ecosystem. Polish is spoken by more than 45 million people worldwide. Around 38 million people live in Poland, with millions more living abroad, including substantial Polish-speaking communities in the UK, Germany, the United States, Canada, Ireland and elsewhere. So this is not some obscure language spoken by a tiny number of people. Given that Amazon acquired a Polish speech-technology company and already has the technology required to synthesise Polish speech, the continued absence of Polish support for Alexa is, in my view, astonishing. Polish-speaking customers deserve to be able to use Alexa in their own language. What I actually like To be fair, the Echo Show 21 has some excellent qualities. The large screen is genuinely impressive. The device is very slim and, when mounted on a wall, can look almost like a framed picture rather than a piece of consumer electronics. The sound quality is also very good. It is a beautiful piece of hardware. That is precisely why the software problems are so disappointing. The hardware has the potential to be something genuinely special, but the experience is constantly undermined by bugs, inconsistent behaviour and features that feel unfinished. It is also a shame that there is no straightforward way to install a genuinely capable AI assistant such as ChatGPT. That could potentially transform the Echo Show 21 into something far more useful. It would also immediately make a much wider range of languages available, including Polish. At the moment, Alexa+ does not come close to ChatGPT in terms of the overall conversational experience, language flexibility or general intelligence. Alexa remains useful for simple smart-home commands and basic tasks — when those commands actually work — but Alexa+ still does not feel like the revolutionary AI experience Amazon's marketing led me to expect. Final verdict The Echo Show 21 is a beautiful and expensive piece of hardware with a large, excellent display and very good sound. But the software experience is far too unreliable. Repeated "Sorry, something went wrong" errors. Commands that have to be repeated several times. Alexa hearing you and then doing absolutely nothing. Broken or degraded YouTube voice controls. Videos randomly resuming by themselves. Apps disappearing from the home screen. Preferred music services apparently being ignored. No sensible way to keep the screen off at night. Alexa unnecessarily interrupting videos and then failing to understand what it has interrupted. For a premium device at this price, there are simply too many bugs and too many things that feel unfinished or poorly designed. If all you want is an expensive digital photo frame that occasionally shows the weather and plays music — after sometimes having to repeat your command several times and hoping you do not hear "Sorry, something went wrong" — then perhaps it is fine. But as a supposedly intelligent smart display powered by Alexa+, the experience is currently deeply disappointing. Knowing what I know now, I would not buy the Echo Show 21 again. The hardware deserves much better software than this.

A Stunning Smart Hub – Functional, Beautiful, and Surprisingly Versatile The Echo Show 15 is hands-down one of the most impressive smart displays I’ve used. With its large 15.6" Full HD screen, it instantly becomes the centrepiece of any room—whether mounted on the wall or placed on a stand. The display is crisp, vibrant, and perfect for everything from streaming content to managing your day. Setup and Interface: Setup was quick and intuitive. The interface is clean and customizable, with widgets that let you tailor the home screen to your needs—calendar, weather, to-do lists, smart home controls, and more. It’s like having a digital command centre that’s always accessible. Alexa Integration: Alexa works flawlessly, responding quickly to voice commands even from across the room. Whether I’m checking the news, controlling lights, setting timers, or asking for recipes, it’s responsive and accurate. The visual feedback adds a whole new layer of usefulness compared to audio-only devices. Entertainment and Streaming: Streaming on the Echo Show 15 is a joy. You can watch Prime Video, Netflix, YouTube, and more directly on the device. The screen size makes it feel more like a mini TV than a smart speaker, and the sound quality is surprisingly rich and clear for its slim profile. Smart Home Control: It’s a fantastic hub for smart home management. With the dashboard view, I can control lights, thermostats, cameras, and routines with just a tap or voice command. It’s especially useful in shared spaces like the kitchen or hallway where everyone can interact with it. Family-Friendly Features: The shared calendar, sticky notes, and photo frame mode make it ideal for busy households. It’s great for leaving reminders, displaying family photos, or coordinating schedules. The visual ID feature is a clever touch—it personalizes the experience based on who’s using it. Final Verdict: The Echo Show 15 isn’t just a smart display—it’s a lifestyle upgrade. It blends functionality with aesthetics, making it perfect for modern homes. Whether you're tech-savvy or just want a more organized, connected space, this device delivers in every way. Highly recommended for families, smart home enthusiasts, or anyone who wants a beautiful, capable assistant that does more than just talk.

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