We are going to take a look at Amazon Echo Input Portable Edition today, which is the first portable wireless Alexa speaker which you can take anywhere, and I think that it really changes how you use a smart speaker, so let’s find out if it is as good as it seems like.
The box that it comes with has a very minimalist design, which I liked, and inside it, you get the Echo Input Portable, A power adapter with a cable for charging, and a manual with some other papers.
The Echo Input portable looks pretty modern and minimalist, it has a fabric covering its circumference which looks very classy, and overall I really like this design.
On top, you have a 4 microphone array like the Echo Dot, an action button to wake alexa up, along with a microphone mute button, and as this is a battery powered device, you only have a single status LED at center instead of a ring around it to save power, but it still suits this speaker well.
On front you have two volume buttons, along with a power button, and if you press it once, you will get the battery status shown by 4 LEDs, and you can of course use this to turn it off to save battery as the microphones are always listening when its on.
At back you have a micro USB input for charging and power, and you don’t have an audio out port on this, which is quite odd given that you have that on the smaller Echo Dot, and it would have been really great to use this with your wired speakers. But you can use it to connect to other Bluetooth speakers wirelessly but I just don’t understand why this has Echo Input in its name, as the actual Echo Input can be used as an input for wired speakers, but you don’t have that ability with this, so they should have just called it Echo Portable.
But confusing nomenclature aside, having a wireless echo device changes everything about the use cases for a smart speaker. So when I am trying to sleep I often listen to music, and smart speakers work really well in those cases because the last thing you want while trying to sleep is torture your eyes with bright screen of your phone while fiddling around with your keyboard to select music, so just being able to tell Alexa what to play is a much better experience.
I often used a Bluetooth speaker connected to an echo dot for this, but now with Echo portable, you can keep it near you and play music and this also makes it a really great alarm clock because you will probably wake up with its 1.5 inch speaker playing inches away from you.
You can also carry it to other places like your kitchen or even in your bathroom, but I won’t recommend that as the fabric covering might absorb things way worse than dust particles and we also don’t have any water resistance mentioned on it. The portability also means that you can use it outside of your home with a mobile hotspot, or use it in your car to play music with its Bluetooth connection.
The 4800 mAh battery it has will last for around 8 to 10 hours, depending on how loud you play it, and I think that is pretty reasonable because even some of the bigger Bluetooth speakers have similar battery life, and you can turn it off when you’re not using it to save battery, and it charges up in around 4 hours.
But a very important thing to remember is that this is not going to last for more than a day if you keep it unplugged, as on standby, it has to keep its microphones and wifi turned on, so you will have to keep it plugged in if you don’t want to turn it off while not using it.
You can also use it like a Bluetooth speaker by connecting your phone to it, but while watching video content, there is still some latency like Echo Dot devices, and I really don’t like that, but for listening to music it works well.
I am not going to cover Alexa features in detail as I have already covered it in my Echo Dot 3d Gen review, which you can watch, but for a quick refresher
You can ask it questions like how low India’s GDP is getting, or if you day has been going too well, you can do currency conversations from US dollars to Indian Rupees, you can ask it to do math for you, get the weather forecast, temperature, set alarms, timers and reminders.
You can place and track your orders from Amazon, control your smart home devices like light bulbs, make it play content on your TV firestick, call other alexa devices and leave messages, and you can add lots of cool skills with the Alexa app like Akinator.
SOUND QUALITY
Now coming to sound quality, it’s not going to sound as good or loud as a standalone Bluetooth speaker that costs 5000 Rs., but it does sound better than I was expecting, given all the features we have on board.
The sound is clear enough to let you enjoy your favourite tracks, and what I liked a lot is that they didn’t make the bass boosted to make it sound bigger, but you get a nice balance of different frequencies with pretty nice mids.
[WATCH VIDEO FOR SOUND TEST]
So overall, I think the Echo Input Portable is a really great launch by Amazon, it is basically a Bluetooth speaker with Alexa that is always listening but that actually makes it a really great device and makes it much more useful.
Aside from lack of audio out port, and latency while watching videos in Bluetooth mode, I don’t think that they could have made this device better, and I think that this is going to be a very successful product, which could also make them release other bigger versions of this speaker.
Even at its non discounted price I think that this is a good purchase, but make sure that you check out the links in the video description to check if there are any discounts going on.
So thanks for watching, you can also check out my video on Echo Dot with clock which is at a similar price point and offers its own unique set of features, give this video a thumbs up if you liked it or a thumbs down if you disliked it, subscribe to channel with bell for more awesome videos, thanks for watching, and I’ll see you, in the next one.
Buy on Amazon India: https://amzn.to/2toC0Pu