Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

I couldn't pass up the introductory price that included a Philips smart LED bulb. We're Alexa-fying our house as a means for dealing with reduced mobility and increased age-related incidents and needs. Yeah, we're really old. And that tempers our overall response to the Gen5 Echo Dot, which could be summed up as "Meh." We were perfectly happy with the basic Gen4 Echo Dot but found that when we wanted to add another unit, G4s are no longer sold except as 'refurbished' or 'open box' - plus the G5 intro bundle was really low cost. The Echo platform is exceptionally useful for our applications, which are out of the ordinary if you're young. For example, we've used "Alexa, turn on all lights" a couple of times for dark-of-night incidents where light has been a boon backdrop for noodling out various solutions. Light (literally) brightens up your mood when your mood is under you-just-awoke-suddenly pressures. Plus, while our house is quite modest, it's well built and pretty sound-proof, so yelling from the bedroom to the basement office just doesn't cut it. We now have Echos in every key room, so 'Alexa, drop in on everybody' gives us quick access to a house-wide intercom. But now for our disappointment. We actually have some usage for decent music reproduction, and the 3.5mm headphone output on the Gen4 Echo allows us to plug through to ancient but high-quality computer speakers scavenged from local thrift stores. No such plug is on the Gen5. Our cheap music solution is no longer possible. Sure, we could use Bluetooth speakers, but units with sound quality comparable to quality, vintage computer speakers are (a) a lot more expensive and (b) require pairing, which I've always found quirky/intermittent/frustrating with Bluetooth. Because we are really old, simply plugging a stereo jack into a Gen4 receptacle just seems easier and more reliable. And, while I kind of wanted to taste the new, higher Gen5 sound with increased bass, what I'm hearing is clearly designed for boom-a-boom thumpity thump popular music. It probably won't surprise you to find that sounds eagerly sucked up by 15-30 year olds isn't really what ancient folks like us want. Jazz, classical, (dare I say) Enya, even "Eres Tu" with its really nice descant at the end -- this is more our range, and it's stuff that requires reined-in bass, un-tinny midrange, and balanced treble. So, between audio engineering decisions and the audio-output de-contenting, for us, Gen5 is not a step up from Gen4. Like all Echos, build quality is outstanding, software capabilities are outstanding -- in fact, incredibly exciting and clearly with few limits -- and the spherical design is minimalistic and very pleasing. It was great that it took nothing more than plugging it in to marry our new G5 unit to all the other Echos dotted around our house. I'm not sorry we added a Gen5 unit, just not jumping for joy. I find myself pigeon-holing it with all the other recent New! New! Product stuff floating out there that offers less, removes wanted accessories, and otherwise pumps up corporate bottom lines at the expense of what (some) owners want. I may come back and add some more praise for the new temperature monitoring some day, but at the moment, we are years away from an Alexa-compatible thermostat...