Amazon’s new Echo Show 15 aims to hang on the wall

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Amazon is once again expanding its Echo Show smart screen lineup, and this time, it’s even bigger. The new $249.99 Echo Show 15 is the company’s largest smart display yet, with a 15-inch 1080p HD display. It also has a different design from the company’s previous models – instead of a touch screen attached to a bulky speaker, the Echo Show 15 is flat and can be hung on the wall.

Amazon’s offering of this smart display is to be a shared hub for families to see things like upcoming calendar appointments, to-dos, sticky note reminders, and shopping lists. He envisions placing it in common spaces – a living room, a frequently accessed hallway, and of course the kitchen. It’s capable of all the things that Echo Show smart displays can do, like play music, view weather reports, stream video, control smart home gadgets, and all the other things you can ask Alexa.

But Show 15 takes advantage of its larger screen to consistently show more useful and positioned widgets along with the familiar swirl of headlines, third-party skill announcements, etc. These tools can be customized to your preference, whether you want to display a calendar, to-do list, recipe recommendations, favorite smart home controls, or something else. Amazon builds a few of these tools itself, but it has also developed an API that developers can use to add to their Alexa skills.

The Echo Show 15 splits its screen between a standard Amazon smart display and new user interface elements. GIF: Amazon

Unfortunately, it will not be possible to fully use the screen with your favorite items if you want to create a smart home control panel, for example. Half of the screen is always dedicated to the rotating house content seen on other Echo Show screens – the other half is where the gadgets live.

The larger screen also comes with the new picture-in-picture feature, which allows you to view a security camera feed or a video doorbell while also looking at other content. It’s the first Echo Show to support Full HD streaming from Netflix, Amazon’s Prime Video, Hulu, and more. Amazon also announced that support for TikTok and Sling TV is coming to its full line of smart displays.

Show 15’s design is very similar to the Samsung Frame

The Show 15’s design is meant to simulate a picture frame, and you can use it to view photos in full screen if you want (Amazon says it adapts its color to ambient light conditions like a lot of other recent Echo Show devices do). There’s a lot of similarity to Samsung’s Frame TV, another screen that’s supposed to look like a picture frame, only on a smaller scale. At launch, the Show 15 has a black bezel with a white frame surrounding the screen – the company won’t commit to releasing other styles in the future when you order it.

This aesthetic picture frame speaks to the Echo Show 15’s intended placement: hanging on the wall in either portrait or landscape orientation. But in demos running before today’s announcement, the Show 15’s power cord was hung from the screen itself, and there was no obvious way to hide it. Amazon didn’t say if the cord was rated for wall use when asked, either. Amazon says other accessories, such as a nightstand or a lower cabinet stand, will be available.

The Echo Show 15 can use its camera to identify who’s in front of it and display personalized information. Photo: Amazon

The Echo Show 15 has a 5MP front camera that can be used for video calls. But it also has the ability to identify who is in front of the Echo Show 15 and then show personalized content, such as greetings, reminders, calendar events, selected notes, or other information about them.

It can also limit the content available to age-appropriate items when it recognizes a child using it. Amazon says this new VID feature takes advantage of the custom-built AZ2 Neural Edge processor inside the Show 15, a follow-up to the AZ1 that debuted in Echo devices last year.

Facial recognition occurs locally on the device

Amazon says that all processing of the visual ID is on-premises, and the identification information is stored on the Echo Show 15 itself, not in the cloud. Face profiles aren’t shared across devices, which means you’ll need to set them up with each individual Echo Show 15 if you have more than one. Turning off or blocking the camera using the built-in shutter will completely disable the feature.

The Echo Show 15 is the biggest update to the form factor of a smart display since it first hit the market a few years ago. It also cleverly addresses a number of issues that have come up with them: they often take up precious counter space and look sharp on gadgets. The Show 15 mostly hides its technology behind an aesthetically neutral design that can work in many homes.

The Echo Show 15 can operate in either portrait or landscape orientation. Picture: Amazon Picture in picture support lets you view doorbell or security camera alerts while you’re doing something else.

But whether the Echo Show 15 will prove more useful than previous Echo smart displays is an open question. Amazon’s new widget system could be easy to use, but I’m still skeptical that third parties will actually take advantage of it in a useful way (a daily viewer has appeared in my briefing more than once, but I’m not convinced of its usefulness).

The Echo Show 15 is also likely to suffer from the shortcomings of previous Echo Show shows. Recipes are often a big step up for smart displays, but unless the recipe you want is in Amazon’s partner databases (Allrecipes, Epicurious, or Tasty), it’s not really something useful in the real world. You also can’t easily share photos or videos from your phone to the Echo Show, like you can cast to an Apple TV or Chromecast on a TV (or one of your Google smart screens).

We’ll have to reserve the final verdict once we can test the Echo Show 15 live. Still, it’s an interesting device, and we’re curious to see how it will fit into a real home when it arrives later this year.

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