Our first look at Amazon’s big new Echo Show 16

Amazon’s latest Echo Show smart display is big, gorgeous, and eye-wateringly expensive. Announced today, the Echo Show 16 costs $499.99 (wall mount included) and is available to preorder now. There’s a Nanomatte display option for $569.99, plus a $100 preorder discount ahead of its release later this year.

After spending time with the device at a small media event in New York City this week, I think the Echo Show 16 could be the versatile family hub Alexa users have been asking for. The sleek hardware brings with it a completely new software experience, including better smart home controls, a much-improved calendar interface, and a real photo frame option — all fully customizable.

But at double the price of the $250 Echo Show 11 and $200 more than Apple’s new HomeView smart display, it may be too expensive, even for diehard Alexa fans.

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The Echo Show 16’s signature feature is its new customizable homescreens. Called Screen Styles, you can choose from a family organizer, a smart home dashboard, an Alexa widgets screen, or a digital photo frame. Unlike existing Echo Shows, these homescreens can stay on all the time or appear when you approach, giving you quick access to your calendar, a new meal-planning feature, or your most-used smart home devices.

This kind of easy interaction has largely been missing from smart home displays, which have traditionally been voice-first devices, with the screen providing additional visual context for the voice assistant inside. Over the years, Amazon has slowly added more functionality to its smart displays, and the Echo Show 16 feels like the culmination of those efforts.

With its size and slim bezels, the Show 16 looks a lot more like a tablet than a smart display, specifically the new Alexa Tablet Pro 12. It even has the same anti-glare Nanomatte display as an upgrade option and sports a MediaTek processor rather than Amazon’s AZ3 chip. “A lot of the same work went into this as the tablet,” Amazon’s head of devices and services, Panos Panay, confirmed to me.

When mounted on one of two optional stands, the Show 16 starts to resemble a small iMac, giving off some strong home-computer vibes, though it verges on too big for a kitchen counter. It’s much thinner than the Echo Show 15 or the 21 (also $499), with significantly slimmer bezels.

In my hands-on, the Show 16’s full HD screen felt responsive, and the display was bright and clear with deep blacks. The sound is better than a tablet and on par with the Show 11, thanks to a slim speaker box that runs the length of the screen and packs in eight custom woofers and two tweeters. Luke Combs’ “The Way I Am” was clear and loud, and the sound was smooth, though it lacked a bit of depth. I didn’t get to test the new microphone positioning (four total) to see whether Alexa can hear any better in this form factor.

While the hardware is impressive, the software is where the experience steps up. The Show 16 is designed as a household hub, a central place to see the family calendar, check the week’s meal plan, view family photos, control smart home devices, and see who’s at the video doorbell. It also runs the full Fire TV interface and comes with a newly redesigned Alexa remote that feels much nicer in the hand.

Along with the Screen Styles, you can choose from one of two ambient screensavers that appear when you’re away from the device: a photo frame or Alexa Recommendations. You can also skip an ambient screen entirely and keep your homescreen accessible at all times.

Alexa Recommendations is the same concept as the customizable rotating screen you see on current Shows. This can show the weather, news, photos, and other options, along with display ads. Amazon didn’t demo this option at the event, but according to Aidan Marcuss, the incoming VP of Alexa and Echo, this screen “will continue to offer the broad variety of content, just as it does now.” I asked whether this includes full-screen ads; he confirmed it does, but they’ll appear only there, not on any other home screen, and you can turn off Alexa Recommendations.

Another key interface change is a new favorites bar you can access from most screens. It opens a programmable quick bar that lets you switch between the device’s functions, including third-party Alexa skills and integrations. This small change makes the device easier to navigate by touch than the current Show interface. It opened promptly in my hands-on, and selecting an app took me directly to the relevant screen.

Of course, this is an Alexa Plus device, and you can still navigate by voice and chat with the assistant, which has had a brain boost. Daniel Rausch, the current VP of Alexa and Echo, who is transitioning into a new role at Amazon next month, says the latest version of Alexa Plus can do deeper research and is smarter. “It has access to more models and now has more depth of reasoning, is more capable of multitasking, and better at breaking down both complex tasks and vague tasks,” he said.

Alexa Plus has a new “next best actions” feature that makes proactive suggestions based on your conversations with it. The demo showed Alexa offering suggestions such as where to buy hardware cloth when you’ve been talking to it about building a chicken coop, or suggesting hiking trails and YouTube videos when you’ve been planning a trip to Scotland. These suggestions appear in a new Alexa Plus interface on the Show, built around “Cards.”

These cards, which also appear in the new Alexa app and on Alexa.com, act as Alexa’s memory, letting you return to a conversation and pick up where you left off; you can also pin cards to the Show in the Alexa Widget face. The cards interface uses the screen real estate better than the current way of talking to Alexa on the Show, which just fills the blue screen with white text.

Another feature that takes advantage of the big screen is an improved map view. This is a ground-up rebuild of the map view that launched in 2023, and it gives you access to all your smart devices in a 3D interface you can zoom in on to control lights, locks, cameras, and more in situ.

The map updates in real time, so when you toggle on a light, the room on the map lights up. It now gives you a bird’s-eye view of your home and neighborhood and can tap into any exterior Ring cameras you have. If someone approaches your house, you’ll see a figure on the map and can tap it to get a live view from the camera that spotted them.

The new UI and its features will eventually come to all current Show devices, though Amazon didn’t share a timeline. However, Marcuss confirmed that while the new customizable homescreens are included for free on the Show 16, it will require a subscription on the older devices. He didn’t confirm exact pricing.

As a category, smart displays have often felt like solutions looking for a problem; they promise to do too many things, but rarely do any very well. Based on my short time with the Show 16, Amazon may have solved that problem and delivered a genuinely useful device. But whether it’s a solution worth spending $500 on remains a big question.

Photos by Jennifer Pattison Tuohy / The Verge

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