Amazon’s new Echo Show 16

Amazon just announced the Echo Show 16, a brand new smart display with a 16-in screen and eight subwoofers packed into a slim speaker behind the display. I got a chance to play with it in New York this week, and here are my top three favorite features. First are the new home screens called screen styles. These let you set your smart display to one screen and one screen only. No rotating, no ads. The second feature, there's now a little favorites tab you can hit in the top left hand corner that drops down a bar to get quick access to things like your calendar, your smart home interface, or any of the Alexa skills or apps that you want to use. The third feature I'm a big fan of is a brand new map view where you can map your entire home and have a 3D digital representation of it on the screen. It's a great interface. You can zoom in and tap on different lights, locks, different elements of your home to control them. What's new here from previous iterations is it's now 3D and you can zoom out for an exterior view of your home if you have exterior cameras and you'll see a little person walking along the screen and if you tap on that, it will show you a live view from the camera that has seen them approaching your house. I think this is a really neat feature and it should make the map view a lot more useful than it has been in the past. Plus, you can show it on your Fire TV as well. Overall, I think the Echo Show 16 is a really interesting hardware upgrade, but it is the software that has made the difference, and that was the difference that the Echo devices really needed. Downside is that price. $500 or $570 for the Nanomat display. That just feels a little too steep for the functionality you get from this. There is $100 off if you pre-order and it's going to be shipping in December. I get it into my house before I can tell you if it's really worth the