When the first Echo Show smart displays were released, I thought they would be perfect for my smart home. Fast-forward several years, and I almost never use them for monitoring my smart home or controlling smart devices. In fact, I get more use out of an old Kindle.
An Echo Show isn’t as good as it should be
I rarely use mine for anything but music
The idea seems great. A voice assistant built into a smart display has the potential to be a really useful device for your smart home. Unfortunately, the Echo Show doesn’t live up to the promise.
Much of the problem is due to Amazon’s proprietary smart home system. An Echo Show should be a great way to display a smart home dashboard that provides information about your smart home and even lets you control devices using the touchscreen. For some reason, Amazon has failed to make it anything of the sort.
Smart control is mostly limited to basic widgets, and trying to see useful information about your smart home devices on an Echo Show is a thankless task. Because the devices are locked down, if a feature you want isn’t part of the stock firmware, there’s nothing you can do about it beyond jailbreaking the device.
- Colors
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Charcoal, Glacier White
- Camera
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13 MP with auto-framing
The Echo Show 8 offers an 8-inch touch screen, easy integration with Ring cameras and accessories, and an improved 13MP camera for video calling. It’s big, offers spatial audio, and works with an array of devices.
A used Kindle can actually be more useful
You can find older used models for $30 or less
A Kindle and an Echo Show seem like very different devices. One is a smart speaker with a built-in display, and the other is an eReader. There’s another important difference between the two: many models of Kindle can be jailbroken.
While it’s possible to jailbreak some Echo Show models now, jailbreaking Kindles is much more mature. Kindle jailbreaks have existed for years, and there’s an established ecosystem of apps you can run on them. Jailbreaking Echo Shows is a comparatively recent phenomenon.
Once a Kindle has been jailbroken, there’s a surprising amount you can do with one. The obvious thing is installing apps such as KOReader that allow you to open and read far more formats than the stock Kindle firmware allows, but you can do anything from turning one into a remote monitor to making your fingers into a wireless page turner.
The beauty of a jailbroken Kindle is that you can display almost anything you want on the screen. That includes displaying useful information about your smart home that isn’t possible using a standard Echo Show.
You don’t need to use an expensive current-generation Kindle, either. An old used Kindle that you can find on second-hand marketplaces for around $30 will do the job almost as well.
An E-Ink display makes the perfect smart home dashboard
Low-power and always-on
This is where a Kindle can really shine and do what the Echo Show should be able to do, but can’t. The display of an Echo Show is perfectly suited to showing key information about your smart home, but for some reason, Amazon doesn’t make this possible. With a jailbroken Kindle, however, you can decide exactly what appears on your screen.
It’s possible to get the Kindle to display a Home Assistant dashboard, and you can have it update at whatever intervals you choose. The shorter the intervals, the shorter the battery life. I designed a minimal dashboard specifically to be displayed on my jailbroken Kindle 4, and it looks stunning and gives me useful information about my smart home that an Echo Show won’t display.
I can even get my ancient Kindle to display the feed from my video doorbell, albeit at about one frame per second. It makes it easy to see who’s at the door when I’m using it to read.
A Kindle can’t do everything an Echo Show can do
You’re not going to talk to a Kindle
While a Kindle can make a great smart home dashboard, it’s not a like-for-like replacement for an Echo Show. Although I almost never use my Echo Shows for smart home control, I do still use them to play music.
This isn’t something you can realistically do with a used Kindle. If you want to be able to play music through smart speakers, an option such as Music Assistant can be a good choice, as you can then play music through any type of supported speaker.
You also can’t use voice commands through a Kindle, for obvious reasons. If you do still use your Echo Show for voice control, an alternative is to set up a local voice assistant such as Home Assistant’s Assist. This lets you control your smart home with your voice without having whatever you say sent to Amazon’s servers to be processed.
A Kindle is more versatile than you might expect
An Echo with a screen sounds like a great concept, but it’s just not that useful. Even an old Kindle can do more with its display than you might be able to manage with your Echo Show. If you’re sick of one Amazon device, you may be able to replace it with another.
