Amazon Alexa Echo Wall Clock Review

It has one job and it's not great at it.

I've been itching to replace my kitchen clock. I stupidly bought a self-setting atomic clock and the instructions said (this was a few years ago so I'm paraphrasing) 'Install as high up as possible on a southern facing exterior wall - ignoring these instructions may interfere with reception of the time signal.' Of course when used in my kitchen it has no idea what the time is. Due to the fancy mechanism it's extremely painful to set the time manually - you push a tiny button and try to stay awake while the hands move round and ultimately overshoot. Repeat.

It really should be illegal to sell things that tell you the time without some self-setting mechanism that works. Would it be hard to encode this in the electricity mains supply for instance? Or acquire via wifi or bluetooth? Every time I get in my car it connects to my phone but the car clock is clearly some cheap crystal that drifts daily and has no idea about daylight savings.

So the Echo Wall Clock is appealing because it should keep the right time without effort in addition to it's main role - visualizing Alexa timers. It's a stripped down implementation of the smart Glance clock but $170 cheaper at $30. It looks like most of those savings went to finding the cheapest possible plastic body. The Echo Clock also skips a face plate, which is a risk as if you touch the hands it will die.

Pairing is easy (via bluetooth) and it does manage to keep the right time. It's a decent if unattractive clock.

The timer function has taken the easy way out. If you set a five minute timer it lights up the minute marks from 12 up and then counts down. On a clock that knows what the current time is. This means that if you want to figure out when something is ready you're going to have to think. You need to look at the lit segments to see how long is left on the timer, and then add this on to the current position of the minute hand. I don't think anyone is buying a $30 timer visualizer to do minute-math. It would be a much better device if it just added the timer onto the current location of the minute hand, which is so obvious that this is what I expected to happen the first time I used it.

Overall it's cheap, cheap looking and flawed. But still a huge improvement on my kitchen's atomic age.

Add your comment...

Book reviews for December 2018

The Late Show (Renée Ballard, #1; Harry Bosch Universe, #29) by Michael Connelly

4/5

The Wandering Earth by Liu Cixin

5/5

The Labyrinth Index (Laundry Files, #9) by Charles Stross

4/5

Add your comment...

Hummingbird 2

A hummingbird at the Marine Cemetery in the Presidio.

(Previously)

Add your comment...

Treasure Island

Updated on Saturday, February 19, 2022

A timelapse from Treasure Island in the San Francisco Bay.

The first half of the video is looking west from Treasure Island and pans along the San Francisco waterfront. The second half was shot east towards Oakland and includes a storm sweeping in from the north.

Add your comment...

Winter Solstice 2018

It's the start of Winter in the Northern Hemisphere (Summer on the other side of the equator). Rendered in Catfood Earth.

(Previously, Previously, Previously, Previously, Previously)

Add your comment...

Pulling the plug on Facebook and Twitter, Tweet Archive

A year ago I uninstalled Facebook and Twitter from my phone in an effort to slim down my social media fake news diet. The idea was I'd occasionally check in from my laptop. Which I didn't. So this week I've finally taken the plunge and deleted both accounts. Or rather, deactivated, you have to wait 30 days before they actually delete anything. I also nuked Quora, because of the hack rather than any particular tendency to undermine the foundations of democracy.

This leaves me with a potential problem. As a person with a rapidly decreasing social media footprint I might be asked to host the Oscars. It would be nice to be tapped, but I really don't want to and so I've published a complete archive of all my tweets. I'm pretty sure some of them would be disqualifying. Whew.

Add your comment...