Big tech lock-in

Google vs. Amazon: The smart display showdown

Both companies' smart displays often feel pretty dumb.

Ron Amadeo – Dec 23, 2022 12:30 PM | 87

Other than Amazon's rotating base, the two main product lines look pretty similar.

Google and Amazon are basically the only game in town if you're looking for a plug-and-play smart display, but the companies arrived at similar products from very different directions. A smart display's usefulness mostly has to do with which ecosystem you've committed to, making recommendations no simple affair. If you're on Team Apple, you'll have to keep hoping that Tim Cook announces a Siri smart display someday.

Both products are rather rigid and will expect you to adapt to them rather than the other way around. The Google Screen will only work with the Google Assistant and will push you toward Google products, while the Amazon Screen will only work with Alexa and will push you toward Amazon products. There are a few partners out there that provide various features like music and cameras, but these products are not as infinitely configurable as a smartphone. Smart displays will often demand adherence to an ecosystem.

The Echo Show 10

The specific hardware doesn't matter too much since these smart displays all run the same Amazon or Google software across various screen sizes, maybe with one extra headline feature. I spent most of my testing time with the $249.99 Amazon Echo Show 10, which has a 10-inch screen and super-cool rotation feature. There's also the stationary $64.99 Echo Show 8, the $39.99 Echo Show 5, and if you want to get really wild, there's the $249.99 Echo Show 15, which has the form factor of a wall-mounted picture frame.

SPECS AT A GLANCE: Echo Show 10
SCREEN	10.1-inch, 1200×800 LCD
OS	Fire OS
CPU	Eight-core Mediatek MT8183 Four Cortex A73 cores and four Cortex A53 cores
GPU	Arm Mali-G72
NETWORKING	Wi-Fi 5 (802.11 a/b/g/n/ac), Bluetooth, Zigbee
CAMERA	13 MP front camera
SIZE	251×230×172 mm
WEIGHT	2560 g
Speakers	2x 1-inch tweeters and a 3-inch woofer
STARTING PRICE	$249.99 (Currently $185)
OTHER PERKS	It spins!

The Echo Show 10's party trick is the ability to spin around, a feature Amazon calls "Smart Motion." The display is mounted on a heavy circular base disguised as a big speaker. There are three small speakers in the base, but there's no room-shaking subwoofer, as you might expect from the size. A big chunk of the bottom is a weighted turntable with a wide electric motor that lets the entire body of the Echo Show 10 do one 360-degree rotation.

The motor can "lock" and "unlock" the screen at various times. At any time, you can grab the screen and move it, which will disengage the motor and allow it to spin freely. The Show 10 weighs an incredible 5.5 pounds, so it's not going anywhere. If you talk to it, the motor will engage and the screen will turn and point at you. You can also have it creepily follow you around the room via tracking from the front camera or control it remotely as a 360-degree security camera.

On one hand, any extra functionality—like 360-degree remote camera usage—is very welcome. On the other hand, being mounted on a rotating base does compromise the touchscreen experience somewhat. The mechanism that lets the screen spin around has a lot of backlash, so even when the screen in supposed to be locked in one position, it never feels like a solid object under your finger taps. Every time you poke it, it will wiggle in one direction or another.

I'm also not entirely sure that Smart Motion works correctly. You can leave the rotation feature on all the time, and the most generous explanation I can give is that it prioritizes aiming the camera at you, not the screen (maybe it's optimized for video calls?). That works fine if you're glancing at the display from far away. Up close, though, only the camera in the top-right corner is aimed at you, while the screen is maybe 10 degrees off. It's not the correct angle for touchscreen usage, and I've been forced to disable Smart Motion when I'm using it up close.

I spent a bit of time with the Echo Show 15, too. I really like the picture-frame style form factor, and it's something I would like to see more companies use. Wall-mount installation takes a bit of work, though, especially if you want to make it look like the ultra-clean install in the press image. To escape having a wire sticking out of the bottom, you'll need an electrical outlet directly behind the screen, probably inset into the wall. The Echo Show 15 has a 1.5-inch-thick power brick that needs to go somewhere, and you're on your own with figuring out how you make that mesh with the flat-against-the-wall form factor.

The display of the Echo Show 15 is a major downside, though—it looks terrible. Nearly every UI element in the Echo Show software has some kind of gradient background, and all of them show significant banding on the Show 15 display.

The Nest Hub(s)

Google's smart displays are the 7-inch, $99.99 Nest Hub (2nd Gen) and the $229.99, 10-inch Nest Hub Max. Again, the hardware doesn't matter much, but the Nest Hub Max is the only Google display with a front camera and decent music speakers, while the Nest Hub 2nd Gen is the only unit that does sleep tracking via a radar "Project Soli" sensor.

SPECS AT A GLANCE: Nest Hub Max
SCREEN	10-inch, 1280×800 LCD
OS	Fuchsia
CPU	Eight-core Amlogic T931 Four Cortex A73 cores and four Cortex A53 cores
GPU	Arm Mali-G52
NETWORKING	Wi-Fi 5 (802.11 a/b/g/n/ac), Bluetooth 5.0, Thread
CAMERA	6.5 MP front camera
SIZE	101.23×250.1×182.55 mm
WEIGHT	1320 g
SPEAKERS	2x 18 mm 10 W tweeters, 1x 75 mm 30 W subwoofer
STARTING PRICE	$229.99 (Currently $164)
OTHER PERKS	Ambient EQ light sensor

There used to be a whole ecosystem of third-party Google smart display devices, but support has waned. The Lenovo Smart Display, JBL Link View, LG WK9 ThinQ Xboom, Sony smart display, and KitchenAid Smart Display are either apparently canceled (the KitchenAid and Sony) or discontinued (everything else). The one surviving third-party device seems to be the Lenovo Smart Clock 2, a $39.99 Google display in the form factor of a 4-inch bedside alarm clock. Google doesn't have a mini display, so it's good that someone is building a product in this form factor.

The Nest Hub Max is a lot more expensive than a Nest Hub 2nd Gen, but you're also getting a serviceable music speaker for that price. The Max's two 18 mm 10 W tweeters, and one 75 mm 30 W woofer are actually a step up from the Nest Speaker (one 19 mm speaker and a 75 mm woofer), making it a very capable music device. The Nest Hub 2nd Gen cuts out the music speaker setup, settling for one 43.5 mm driver—which isn't much better than a 40 mm Nest Mini speaker. That's good enough for voice responses, but it's not something I'd want to listen to music on.

The highlight of both Google products is probably the Ambient light sensor setup, which does color and brightness matching for your room lighting. Amazon has a similar feature on paper, but the Google displays are the only ones that are tuned so well and change so aggressively that they blend into your lighting environment, as opposed to being a big square display that blasts light into the room. Having a computer display or TV turned on in a room is almost always distracting thanks to all the light they pump out, but the Google Smart Displays are very unobtrusive. That follows the software design, too. The Amazon displays are visually noisy billboards, while it's easy to forget a Google smart display is there.

Our pick: Google is the winner

If I had to pick a winner, it would be the Nest Hub, because there is an actual ecosystem of decent apps behind it, and it's not a giant ad billboard like the Amazon display is—though you can disable many of those ads in the Amazon display's settings.

Another reason I would choose the Nest Hub is because Amazon's layoffs of Alexa staff should give anyone in that ecosystem pause. You need to feel confident your ecosystem of choice will continue to see some investment.

I know citing Google as a bastion of stability in a market is a surprise, but the company does actually have a third version of these products planned, so it sounds like they're sticking around for a while. Google has committed to supporting these products for five years at minimum, so they should have a decent lifetime.

Noting some of the downsides

The Google Home idle screen. You can pick from a clock or a Google Photos slide show. Credit: Ron Amadeo

Both the Google and Amazon smart displays are Big Tech systems that grew out of their voice assistants, and while they use the speakers and microphones well, the "display" part of these smart displays might sometimes seem like an afterthought.

A prime example is the idle mode that kicks in when you aren't actively using the displays. Most of the time, Google's smart display is just a clock or photo frame. It can display other buttons and features if you walk up and poke it, but it will very quickly kick back over into idle mode, which will only show the time, weather, and/or a photo collection. It's not as useful as it could be, but it's unobtrusive, which is a big improvement over option No. 2.

Amazon's idle mode, by contrast, feels like setting up a roadside digital billboard in your house. It will constantly run slide-show ads for Amazon products. If you don't turn off options like "explore local places," you'll get "suggestions" like, "what time does Whole Foods close?" (Amazon owns Whole Foods).

It also shows new releases from Amazon Music or products you should buy from Amazon. Fortunately, you can go into the settings and turn these ads off. But for the out-of-the-box experience, the Google platform is less invasive.

If you're interested in smart home functionality or a way to monitor camera feeds, neither system has an always-on "single pane of glass" interface like Home Assistant or Action Tiles. Neither interface features much in the way of customization to highlight your most-used functions and make them readily accessible, which is a shame. Amazon provides a "widget" drawer that you can open for a few seconds, but that doesn't help with the "glanceable information" I'm concerned with. You'd think you'd be able to display a calendar, notes, weather, or a camera feed on one of these products, but that's never an option.

The lack of customization is especially strange considering both Google and Amazon smart displays have run Android-based OSes at various times. That codebase already comes with an infinitely customizable home screen with widgets and app icons, and both companies just threw it out.

The best feature of either display is the timer function. If you need a timer, setting it on a display with a countdown is pretty handy.

All that ecosystem lock-in stuff

Probably the biggest problem with smart displays is that they're appliances, not smartphones or tablets. So when you're trying to figure out if your preferred service or hardware will work with the display, the answer is often "no." Both companies have websites pitching the upcoming "Matter" smart home spec—backed by Apple, Amazon, and Google—as a silver bullet for these compatibility issues, but with other smart home standards already out there, it's hard to know which one might fix the situation.

It's hard to say if Matter will matter because it's not out yet, and the politics of lock-in disarmament are tricky. For instance, Matter could let Google replace the Google Cast ecosystem with a more open video-casting protocol, but will Google actually give up that market advantage when the time comes? Most of these compatibility issues seem more like policy decisions rather than technical challenges that need to be overcome with an additional smart home standard, but we'll see.

Google's Assistant page is just so overwhelming. Credit: Ron Amadeo

Back in the world of "today," both Google and Amazon publish some documentation about compatible devices and services, and a quick look through them could help you choose. Many of these categories are grossly inflated with a ton of garbage apps. You might expect a good list of music services to be about 20 items long, but Google's listing shows hundreds of music services, including the likes of "104.3 the Hippo! The Central Coast's Classic Rock Leader!" Amazon's Alexa "skills" store is also inundated with garbage, and most of these apps are built for the voice-only Echo speakers.

It's worth noting that Google and Amazon landed in the role of "ecosystem provider" from two opposite directions. Google was a huge ecosystem company first, thanks to years of running web productivity apps and making Android. Speakers and smart displays are only a recent addition, so just about every command to the Google Assistant funnels data into a huge suite of top-quality web and phone apps. As long as a feature isn't in the middle of a Google shutdown-and-reboot cycle, you can usually access your data from somewhere else with a great interface.

Amazon is an e-commerce company that built its voice assistant first and then had to deal with storing and accessing its data. It's not always clear where this data will go or how Amazon plans to make it useful. For instance, Alexa has a to-do list feature. Is there an Amazon Notes app somewhere? Can I access it from the web? Can it be integrated with other services? The answer is usually "no," and the Alexa app has to act as a dumping ground for data that has no real service behind it.

The design of Amazon's Alexa Skills page looks like it was ripped straight out of Blackberry World from 2009./ars_img]

It's difficult to make definitive statements about what does and does not work with these devices, but let's give it a shot:

Music: Google's music service, YouTube Music, only works on Google displays, while Amazon's music service, Amazon Music, only works on Amazon displays. Spotify, Pandora, Deezer, iHeartRadio, and Apple Music work on both. Amazon also has Tidal and SiriusXM compatibility. My favorite music service, Soundcloud, doesn't work by voice on either platform.
Podcasts and audiobooks: Google's services, Google Podcasts and Google Play Books, only work with the Google displays, while Amazon's services, Audible and Amazon Music, only work on the Echo. Apple Podcasts and Spotify work on both platforms.
Lists and reminders: Alexa only works with Amazon's lists and reminders, and those only exist in the Alexa app. The one exception is the Alexa Shopping List, which is literally part of the Amazon.com shopping website. Amazon assumes you'll be buying any listed items from Amazon and provides handy Amazon search links for everything. I'm usually building a shopping list for groceries, and I'm not in range of Amazon Fresh, so this feature is pretty useless for me. (I enter "lettuce," and Amazon sends me to this $20 listing that will arrive "unrefrigerated" sometime next week. Yum.) Out of the box, Google is much better and supports Google Keep (this option is great), Google Shopping (this is as bad as the Amazon list), and third-party apps Any.do, AnyList, and Bring Shopping Lists.
Camera feeds: Showing a camera feed should not be difficult since there's an easy, generic standard called an IP camera. Neither platform supports generic IP cameras, though, opting instead to make camera companies integrate with some proprietary platform standard instead. Google has a list of compatible cameras here. I could not find a list of supported Echo Show cameras. Both companies would prefer you go with their in-house camera solutions—Nest for Google and Ring or Blink for Amazon.
Photos: Google only supports Google Photos. Amazon works with Amazon Photos and Facebook.

I could continue listing various services like this, but you get the idea. Compatibility with smart home devices is also a mess. You can buy individual items that will hook into these proprietary ecosystems, or you can get a hub like Smart Things or Home Assistant, which will plug into either ecosystem. Generally, both platforms support lights and thermostats, but they limit what locks they're willing to work with. Again, Matter might change this situation someday.

In general, Google and Amazon currently don't work together or use existing standards, opting instead for in-house or proprietary solutions.

Locked out by lock-in

Lock-in works both ways. The demand that you go all-in on one ecosystem for these devices also makes them unappealing to everyone who doesn't live in the Google or Amazon company town.

Nobody can make apps or custom interfaces for these devices, so you'll have to use whatever interface and capabilities the devices provide out of the box. Even if you do live in one of these ecosystems, the displays' software don't seem very mature. Amazon is not a major consumer software company, and that's very noticeable on the Echo Show. The Echo Show line is only five years old, but the software somehow looks older than that. Google is on its third operating system for these devices now, and the actual software still seems pretty basic as a result. I still can't browse a list of YouTube subscriptions or a list of music or do many of the common-sense things you'd want to do with a touchscreen.

Ron Amadeo Reviews Editor

Ron is the Reviews Editor at Ars Technica, where he specializes in Android OS and Google products. He is always on the hunt for a new gadget and loves to rip things apart to see how they work. He loves to tinker and always seems to be working on a new project.

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