It's Amazon's largest smart, connected display sold to date. With a 15.6-inch screen, you can do all the standard Echo Show tasks, but with more screen real estate. These tasks include watching step-by-step instructions for a new recipe, watching videos on YouTube or Amazon Prime Video, or asking Alexa to tell your kids a joke.

Last month, I used the Echo Show 15 in the home setting and in my home office. It's a tool I use to quickly check my daily schedule and to check camera feeds from time to time. Although I found it useful, there are still a few areas that need a bit of work.

A small TV or a very large smart screen?

Setting up the Echo Show 15 isn't a long or difficult process. You connect it to your Wi-Fi network, log into your Amazon account, and you're up and running minutes later. That's the easy part, but there's one aspect of initial setup that can seem daunting: where to put the 15.6-inch screen?

In the box of the Echo Show 15 you will find the necessary parts to mount the screen on a wall, or you can opt for a screen mounting system.

Personally, I wish Amazon had included the stand with every Echo Show 15 instead of selling it as an extra accessory. You have to be really committed to your smart home setup to drill holes in your wall and permanently mount the Echo Show 15.

The Echo Show 15 can be configured in landscape or vertical orientation, whether you attach it or use the stand. Amazon included the stand with mine, so that's what I used for testing.

In landscape orientation, the Echo Show 15 measures 40 centimeters long, 25 centimeters high and 3.5 centimeters thick. Amazon lists the Echo Show 15 as weighing 2.2 kilograms. If you decide to mount it on your wall, be sure to follow the instructions and take all necessary precautions to keep it in place.

Amazon's quad-core AZ2 Neural Edge processor powers the Echo Show 15, and a 5-megapixel camera sits in the top left corner of the device. There's a physical switch just above the camera that you can slide to cover the camera. It's that same camera that's used for Amazon's new visual ID feature (we'll get to that in a minute) and for video calling.

Image: Jason Cipriani/ZDNet.

Above the camera are a few buttons to control the volume and mute the microphone, which is always active.

The camera leaves a lot to be desired in terms of photo or video quality, but it's good enough for casual calls with friends or family members.

I can't decide if the Echo Show 15 is best considered the right size of a modern take on a small kitchen TV, or if it's just a really big one. smart screen.

A hub for your family... or not

Image: Jason Cipriani/ZDNet.

For the first two weeks, I sat the Echo Show 15 on my kitchen counter in an attempt to use it as a central hub for my family. I connected my iCloud calendar to my Alexa account, so the Show 15 can display appointments and events from our shared family calendar.

It quickly became apparent that I was the only person in my family using the Echo Show 15 – aside from a few random Alexa requests from my kids.

Eventually, I moved the Echo Show 15 to my office where I could peek at the calendar widget to see what's next on my agenda.

The basic interface layout of the Echo Show 15 features rotating information on the left side of the screen, while the right side displays any widgets you've added. For now, there are 22 widgets to choose from. Of these 22 widgets, only the Cookpad widget, which displays popular dishes, is created by a third-party developer. The other widgets are created by Amazon and display shortcuts to your music accounts or your calendar.

I would love to see more widgets made by third-party developers, like an Apple Music or Spotify widget, or even a Ring widget with photos taken by my outdoor cameras.

During initial setup, I activated Visual ID for just my personal Amazon account (as opposed to my entire family) on the Echo Show 15. The process takes a few minutes, and it's similar to activating Face ID on an iPhone. The Echo Show 15 has to scan and register your face, which is done locally on the smart display itself.

According to Amazon, no information leaves the device.

Once a face is registered with Visual ID and the Echo Show 15 recognizes you when you approach or pass in front of the screen, it automatically changes the information that appears on the screen, adapting it to the person near the screen. For example, when I approach the Echo Show 15, my personal calendar is displayed, along with news suggestions based on my past interactions with the device.

You can set up visual identification for all family members linked to your Amazon account, including your children. If you turn it on for kids, the Echo Show 15 will turn the interface into a kid-friendly experience.

Visual ID is also available on the Echo Show 8 and Echo Show 10 models. For me, it has become a must-have feature. Knowing that every time I interact with the Echo Show 15 the information presented is specific to me and my interests solves a problem I've had for a long time with smart displays. Indeed, I was seeing random suggestions and content that was of no interest to me or whoever was using the Echo Show at the time.

Performance can be hit or miss

As you can see, there are random freezes like empty space on the left side of the screen. Image: Jason Cipriani/ZDNet.

My biggest complaint about the Echo Show 15 is the sporadic slowdowns in performance. Sometimes swiping down from the top of the screen to bring up the shortcuts menu takes a second or two, while other times it's instantaneous. The same goes for tapping or swiping through the various menus. Today I waited at least 30 seconds for the list of available widgets to show up when I tried to navigate to the gallery. As soon as I went back to the home screen and back to the gallery, it loaded instantly.

There is also often a delay when using the new "picture in picture" feature, which will display all compatible security cameras (Ring and Blink are both supported).

At one point during my review, I asked Amazon about the slow display. I was asked to provide specific examples, so I decided to take a photo of the problem. However, for the next five minutes – while filming – I couldn't get the Echo Show 15 to slow down at all. Everything was fast, responsive and worked as expected.

What's frustrating with the performance of the Echo Show 15 is that there's no reason why it's slowing down. He does, and then he doesn't. I noticed that there have been a few software updates since I first installed it, so it's possible that Amazon is slowly improving performance and fixing the bugs I encountered.

To summarize my trial of the Amazon Echo Show 15

Whether or not to get the Echo Show 15 depends on how invested you are in Amazon's ecosystem of Echo products and services. For someone with lots of smart home devices that are tied to Alexa for automation, routines and such, the Echo Show 15 makes a lot of sense.

For someone heavily invested in Google Home or Apple Home Kit, I'm not sure the Echo Show 15 makes sense. It's true that none of these companies have a comparable product – except the Nest Hub Max – but the same can be said of all Amazon Echo products.

I definitely see the need and value of a large smart display like the Echo Show 15 for organizing a family, keeping tabs on your smart home gadgets, and even watching live video feeds from your cameras. With the addition of Visual ID, impromptu interactions are more personal and efficient.

Source: ZDNet.com