Amazon Echo Dot 3rd Generation

VERDICT Better, louder audio with the same great design – the latest version of Amazon’s dinky speaker is another winner.

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AMAZON HAS LONG been cheerfully ignoring the old maxim of ‘if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it’. The original Kindle still works perfectly well, but Amazon has honed the e-reader format into both the first and last words in the industry. And that’s what it’s doing now with the compact smart speaker, one device at a time.

Equally, the Echo Dot didn’t really need fixing, but Amazon did it anyway – twice now, in fact. This is the only Echo device to be on its third iteration, and the newest Echo Dot is a masterclass in making everything better without a price hike.

The Echo Dot costs £50 – the same as its predecessor – and that means that in terms of competition, there’s only one game in town: the Google Home Mini. This, however, lacks an audio output jack, unlike the Echo Dot, which has a 3.5mm auxiliary output. As a result, it’s in the peculiar position of being both Amazon’s entry-level smart speaker and a device that can connect to any other sound system, whether it costs £100 or £10,000.

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