Amazon Echo Show review: the smart speaker with a screen has great potential

The Amazon Echo Show takes the Alexa voice assistant and squeezes it into a cross between a digital photo frame, small TV and smart speaker for something that's more than just an interesting novelty. The Echo Show is effectively what you get if you took an Alexa-integrated Fire tablet, put a powerful speaker on the bottom and framed it with glossy black plastic. The result is a rather monolithic look. For such a small thing it looks fairly imposing, and has split opinion of visitors to my house 50:50 on whether it's attractive, but placed in a corner or on a shelf, it can easily blend in with the surroundings. In fact, when it's not actively doing something, the Echo Show can operate like a smart, internet-connected version of those digital photo frames that quickly went out of fashion.