Amazon Echo Show 5 (3rd Gen, 2023 release) Kids | Designed for kids, with parental controls | Galaxy

Great home addition
This is the perfect addition to any household. Set up was super easy, connects to wifi easily and working with the alexa app makes it super easy. I love the drop in feature this offers, when I have to leave the house I can still see whats going on. I can still talk to my husband and kids and see the whole 1st floor where the echo is located. We can even check in on our frenchie when we are out. My kids love to call their aunt and Grandmother as well. This feature is easy to setup on the alexa app you can connect to your phone and allow only who you want your kids to call. They just say “Alexa call Grandma” they can even Video call which is what we really use it for. Of course you have the ability to ask Alexa questions too. My kids have used this for the tooth brushing song and love it . The Echo can tell bedtime stories and they can even use this to watch shows or play music. We haven’t explored all of the features yet but we look forward to it. The only upgrade I would like to see is that it can be charged and hold a charge, currently you need to keep this plugged in so its not easy to take into different rooms. I would like to be able to take these places like maybe out to dinner so My kids can watch a show, play a game while waiting for dinner or even to take on road trips. All and all we love this Echo show and I now want another for the other rooms in our home.

Using it for security and kid
While I was researching Alexa’s security system I noticed that this device was exactly the same (with a slightly bigger speaker) as the regular Amazon show 5 except it had features for kids and came with a free subscription to Amazon kids + for a year… having a 2 and a half year old I thought that I’d get this device for my daughter to enjoy. Now, the only problems I found with this system was that it’s extremely complicated to set up with other cameras. I worked as an Apple tech support advisor for nearly 5 years and would consider myself very tech savvy. I already had a Roku camera, a blink doorbell camera and a geeni cam that I use next to my daughter’s crib when she’s napping and/or sleeping… so I thought it would be easy enough to connect all of these devices to this and have one connected security system. But it took me over a month to get all 3 devices working together and then we changed our internet provider which threw the entire system out of wack. I still can’t figure out how to get my blink doorbell to show me a live view of my front door… I had to sign up for a blink monthly subscription and a Roku monthly subscription in order to get to use all of the features but it’s still not working as smoothly as I’d like it to. I realize that the continuity that Apple provides is better than any other services out there but it is extremely expensive and I liked the price point on this system. After a few months I can say that I do plan on getting myself set up on apples HomeKit in the future because I absolutely love the ease of using my iPhone, iPad, MacBook, Apple TV, AirPods, my wife’s beats ear buds and our AirTags… the continuity is second to none and after trying out this complicated Alexa set up it’s clear to me that I’m best sticking with Apple. I would recommend this to friends who are more familiar with Alexa’s system but I would not recommend that my mom or someone who is not tech savvy use this… if I could get it set up and working the way that I know it can then I’d be happy but the complicated system is just too much to learn.Update: 3/8/2024Ok, so I realized that the issues I was having had more to do with the blink doorbell camera… I ordered the sync module for that and that should resolve those issues. In the meantime I was able to get my outside Roku camera, the camera that I use to monitor my daughter and 2 smart plugs to work with the Alexa system. Also, my daughter has begun to show an interest in the kids + service which I think is great. So I definitely should at least increase this rating to 4 stars.

Already started a return. This is an ad machine.
On Prime Day I purchased an Echo Show 8, Show 5 and Kids Show 5. I already knew from reviews that I was going to get advertisements even if I turned off all the home content options. I figured I’d tolerate it because the pros out weigh the cons. They don’t. What finally did it for me was finding out there are advertisements in the stories. I asked Alexa to play a kids story for my toddler and myself at bedtime… The stories had name drops for big companies like Target and YouTube, product placement for Dyson vacuums. It’s disgusting. Today I went into Prime Video and selected “kids” and found several TV-MA and Rated R shows. It does less and functions worse than my iPad Pro. The OS can be slow, it’s not consistent (set it for 24 hr/military time, goes back and forth between 24 and 12 hr, widgets stop being accessible from Home Screen, constantly have to reset them just for them to go back to red x’s, etc). It only displays my security cameras for 10 minutes at a time when I bought them to have constant visual of the cameras. Sometimes it won’t connect to the cameras even though I just had the cameras pulled up a literally one second prior. To summarize, the Show series are basically advertising tablets. I didn’t pay to have advertisements in my home. We are just going to use old tablets for the camera system. The Echo Shows don’t really do anything special that an iPad doesn’t do better. These just have too many issues. Would have tolerated them if it weren’t for the ads. Truly disgusting and unreal.