Amazon is bricking primary feature on $160 Echo device after 1 year
arstechnica.com
It’s pretty cool how things we purchase can just lose functionality at the drop of a hat.
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It’s pretty cool how things we purchase can just lose functionality at the drop of a hat.
We have an older Echo Show in the kitchen. I hate it. It’s genuinely one of the single most ill-conceived, user-unfriendly products I’ve ever experienced. It’s straight up dog shit.
My wife originally picked it up because Amazon were flogging them for something like £30 as a loss-leader. Figured it would make a useful bedside clock and smart speaker in one. It’s a shitty clock, and absolutely fucking useless on the bedside because it keeps flashing shit up in the dark. You can’t load any photos on to it, so you’re stuck looking at whatever artwork/“tips”/ads it wants to show you.
I don’t understand how Amazon created a device that looks like a little picture frame, that would be an ideal bedside clock, and apparently at no point did they consider that people might want to use it like that.
We since got a Google thing that’s essentially the same device (free with an energy tariff), and y’know, Google did a good job with that thing. Just sits in the bedroom being a clock and smart speaker, dimming nicely when the lights are out, never advertising shit at us.
I use it as a Bluetooth speaker, which also sucks because it’ll randomly refuse to disconnect from my phone even though I did it through my phone’s settings. It’ll be disconnected, then I’ll be sat in the lounge and I’ll hear it reconnect, like some kind of cunt.
And they’ve programmed it to talk ALL THE FUCKING TIME. “NOW CONNECTED TO YOUR PHONE”. Yes, I fucking know it is, I just told you to do that.
It is legitimately the worst bit of tech I’ve ever used, and I’ve used a Virgin Media cable TV box.
There really should be a Bluetooth setting for "do not auto connect me." My car does this too, I wear bluetooth headphones a lot and for short to medium car trips it's not worth it to have to connect and put my headphones back only to pull them back out and reconnect after I arrive, I'd rather just listen to headphones the whole time, but my car waits until I've turned on the car and pulled out of the driveway to auto connect against my wishes.
Sadly I don't think bluetooth was really designed for how interconnected it has become. I'm still annoyed bluetooth multi-point is so broken :/, rather than interviewing multiple audio sources to the same speaker it just force mutes one when the other comes and at least for my momentum 4s I don't see an option to set the priority or suppress this.
Bluetooth is definitely due for an overhaul.
The way multiple connections are managed at the moment is woefully inadequate (when the devices even support it).
Hah mine too. Playing a game on my laptop. Pull up my phone. Browse to a webpage. My headphones “OH YOU WANT TO LISTEN TO THE AD ON THIS PAGE ON YOUR PHONE OK SURE RIGHT NOW ONLY AD ONLY AD”
Fuuuuckkkk
I'm really sorry you have to share a home with that shitty device. Maybe break a window, mess up the place, and throw it away and pretend it was the only item stolen.
for what it’s worth you can “alexa turn off the screen” to help when it’s dark
Thanks for this tip. I had no idea this was an option.
All of which is to say, once I finally get around to picking up a half way reasonable Bluetooth speaker for the kitchen I’m putting a fucking hammer through that fucking show. Useless lump of crap.
i remember when virgin media first used tivo boxes. was a simpler time