Amazon Echo Dot with Clock (5th gen) review: A great all-round package

Amazon’s fifth-generation Echo Dot has been on the market for more than a year now, offering better sound than its predecessor and a lot of smarts in a compact, cute, fabric-covered sphere package. It’s the most popular Echo for a reason.

I’ve lived with the speaker for the past year, set up in a bedside pair. I’ve had two variants: the regular Echo Dot and the Echo Dot with Clock. I reviewed the former when it was new, and I’ve sat on the latter for a while to see what it’s like to live with over an extended period. After more than a year, I have some thoughts.

Amazon Echo Dot with Clock (5th Gen)

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The Echo Dot with Clock (5th gen) is a brilliant bedside assistant. It offers great sound for its size and price, and the LED display is genuinely useful as a clock and so much more.

Pros

• Sounds great in a stereo pair
• LED display is genuinely useful
• Responsive to voice commands, and consistently reliable
• Great price

Cons

• No built-in Zigbee
• Automated LED on/off would make it much better

Price, specs and availability

The Amazon Echo Dot with Clock (5th gen) has been available to buy since late 2022 and is available in Glacier White and Cloud Blue colour variants. It retails around $60 in the US and £65 in the UK but is often discounted during major shopping events like Black Friday and Prime Day.

Clock display

Useful addition, or depressing insomnia countdown?

Since the rest of the speaker is the same as the regular 5th gen Echo Dot, it makes the most sense to start with the one feature that sets the ‘with Clock’ edition apart from the others: the LED clock display.

It’s a basic thing, but it’s one that makes a difference. Because – let’s face it – the regular Echo Dot isn’t constantly useful. When sat in its standby state, waiting for a command and not playing music – it’s just a passive orb taking up precious space on a bedside table.

With the Echo Dot with Clock, you get a permanent clock displayed using a simple LED light grid. It’s always on, even at nighttime, and can use the Echo’s built-in ambient light sensors to detect when it’s dark, and then adapt the brightness so that it’s not too bright at nighttime. When dimmed, it’s still easily the brightest thing on my bedside, but it’s also dim enough that I find it easy to ignore.

That is – of course – apart from those nights where I just can’t get to sleep, and it becomes a depressing reminder of how long I’ve not been able to sleep and how little time I have left until morning. At those times, at 4am, I’d very much like it not to be there.

In the Alexa app for iPhone and Android, you do get the option to manually turn down the brightness if you want and switch off the auto-brightness feature. You can even switch the LED display off completely if you like. What I’d love to see would be an option in that same menu to schedule it to switch off the LED display at certain times of the day.

Or – even better – use the built-in motion sensor to detect when there’s been no movement for a while and switch off the clock whenever there’s an empty room or when I’m lying still asleep. With that feature, it would mean if I woke up in the night and got up, it’d light up, and I could check the time easily. Once I was lying down again, it would switch off.

Because this feature isn’t there, it’s one reason why my iPhone, turned horizontal on its wireless charging stand, is a more useful bedside clock with its StandBy feature.

Its usefulness goes beyond just being a clock, however. It’s capable of displaying text and basic shapes and icons. So when you ask about the weather, it can show a little weather symbol, like a cloud, alongside the temperature.

When it’s playing music, the track’s name scrolls across the sphere’s surface. It can even show little smiley faces and other icons that are appropriate to what you’ve asked or what it’s responded to.

Design, controls and smarts

Simple and intuitive, but a little rough around the edges

Anyone familiar with the Amazon Echo – as a product – will be familiar with the physical control system on the top of the Echo Dot. It’s the same across pretty much all Echo devices and features the multi-function button, the mute button for switching off the mic and the two volume buttons. That’s it.

Pocket-lint

1. Press the multi-function button to launch Alexa, or press and hold it to reset the device to factory settings. The volume buttons are self-explanatory, as is the button designed to mute the mic. There are other hidden controls, however.

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One of those is a sensor that allows you to tap the speaker’s top. It can perform a couple of different tasks. Firstly – it will snooze your alarm in the morning if you’ve set your Echo to wake you up. Secondly – it will pause the track you’re listening to and then play it again.

It works well for the most part, and – once I got the knack of how much force it needed and the best position for tapping – it worked consistently every time. At the beginning, I’d often activate it accidentally by knocking the speaker, and sometimes, when I deliberately tried to activate it, it wouldn’t work. But like many things, it does its job well once you find the best way to work it.

There are motion and temperature sensors, which can be used to activate different routines and smart home products. For instance, you can set up a routine whereby if your Echo detects a high temperature, it will switch on a fan. Or, you can have the motion sensors set up to launch any number of smart home routines.

As an example, it could be set to switch the smart light bulbs off in a room where it hasn’t detected any motion for a while. Or you can have it kick those lights on when it does.

Used in its basic functionality, giving it voice commands, I’ve been really pleased with how quickly it responds to its wake word. Saying “Echo” usually results in an almost-instant blue light around the base to indicate it’s listening. Then it understands and responds accurately every time I’ve used it, except the times when it sometimes can’t find a song I’m looking for.

From a smart home perspective, the one piece missing is Zigbee. Unlike the bigger Echo models, it won’t automatically detect and connect to smart home products nearby. But with Alexa’s skills and setting those up through the Alexa app, it can still control pretty much everything.

Sound

Best in a stereo pair

Something I noted in the standard Echo Dot review was how I think the best way to experience the sound from this small speaker is in a pair. And, a year later, I still firmly believe that, especially when you’re using it on a bedside table. You’re far better off having one on each side, with the two speakers set up as a pair, with one playing the left channel and the other playing the right channel.

There’s not much better to me than waking up late on a weekend, putting on some relaxed tunes, and being immersed in that sound as it’s playing around me from both sides of my bed.

That’s not to say the sound isn’t good from one speaker. Its built-in 44mm driver delivers a surprisingly balanced sound profile thanks to a deeper bass than its predecessor. It’s still a little too small to fill a large room properly, but it serves perfectly well as a single speaker in a smaller room.

Now, it’s worth noting – again – this is an affordable small speaker, so you’re not going to get the absolute best, textured and full-bodied sound. If you want the best Echo for sound quality, you want the Echo Studio – which costs a lot more and is much bigger. Despite its tendency to lose some texture in the lower frequencies, the Echo Dot still sounds very good for its price.

With the stereo setup, however, it can throw the mixed audio tracks in different directions, adding a more immersive feel to the music you’re listening to. In fact, you can even set them up in a pair to act as stereo speakers for your Amazon Fire TV Stick.

Amazon’s Echo platform supports music from Amazon Music, Apple Music, Deezer, Spotify and Tidal, giving you the flexibility to choose any of those as your default player. Once you’ve set a default, a simple command to play a playlist, album, song, or artist will automatically choose your preferred service provider.

Personally, I use it with the Apple Music integration and can use it in just about any way I want to. I can ask it to shuffle playlists, which will play in shuffle mode. And – once playing – I can use the Alexa app to skip tracks, play or pause them, or I can use voice commands.

The only thing Echo Dot’s missing on this front is support for AirPlay 2. For Apple product users, it’s the one extra feature that would make them just that bit more convenient to play music through.

Integrating them into a wireless multi-room system made up of other AirPlay-compatible speakers would be brilliant, too. As it stands, the best – and only – way to use them in a multi-room setup is using other Amazon Echo devices or speakers with Echo/Alexa built in.

Verdict

The fifth-generation Echo Dot was already one of my favourite smart home speakers, but the addition of the LED display adds that tiny bit more usefulness to an already very useful product.

Alexa voice commands are met with instant recognition, the sound is balanced, with a decent amount of bass – improved further by pairing it with another Echo Dot – and the ‘tap to pause/play/silence’ feature is really useful when my alarm goes off in the morning.

Yes, it could sound better, and adding AirPlay support would make it that much more useful for Apple users, but the Echo Dot is still a great all-round package that doesn’t cost all that much.