Amazon’s third-generation Echo Dot looks good and sounds great. With its much improved sound, it is now a much better smart speaker than the Google Home Mini. If you already own an old Echo Dot and are using it to power a bigger, better speaker, there’s no need to upgrade. However, if you use your Echo Dot as your main speaker, the new Echo Dot is for you.
The Echo Dot is chubbier and snugger than its predecessor, though it’s about the same size. Instead of hard plastic, the speaker now has a fabric cover in one of three shades of gray. Choose wisely, because unlike the larger Echo, you can’t change the cover after you buy the speaker.
Like previous Echo Dots, the speaker has a colored light ring around the edge and four buttons on the top: volume buttons, a microphone mute, and an action button. The speaker is 3.9 inches in diameter and 1.7 inches tall, and weighs 10.6 ounces. It’s portable in the sense that you can easily pick it up and move it from room to room, but it needs to be plugged in.
You connect the Echo Dot to your Wi-Fi network via the Alexa app or a web browser. The new Dot supports 802.11ac, which significantly increases the device’s Wi-Fi range on a 5 GHz network when used with an 802.11ac router.
The sound quality from the single 1.6-inch driver is much, much better than the old Echo Dot. The old Echo Dot sounded miserable, like a transistor radio from the 1960s. It was fine for Alexa’s voice, but music was extremely tinny. The new Echo Dot at least has a hint of bass and a much rounder midrange. Take two Echo Dots, and you can even form them into a stereo pair.
The Dot now sounds much better than the Google Home Mini. The Home Mini isn’t as painfully tinny as the old Dot, but it pushes voices far ahead of all other sounds when you play music. So it’s entertaining to listen to your favorite singers, but you get a very false sense of the background instruments. The new Dot at least brings things together a little better.
