Amazon’s Echo Spot is back with better sound and no camera

Amazon promises the new Half-Circle has improved hardware across the board, with “even better graphics and improved sound quality.” It’s also capable of setting up and controlling Matter devices in your smart home, like the Echo Dot and Echo Pop, as well as connecting over Wi-Fi (2.4 and 5 GHz), Amazon Sidewalk, and Bluetooth Low Energy Mesh.

There’s also a hardware button to mute the microphone, as well as physical volume buttons, and this time it adds a blue color option to the mix, as well as white and black. The display can be set to one of six colors (orange, purple, magenta, lime, turquoise, and blue), and you can also customize the clock faces.

It also includes a number of animations related to answers to questions such as the weather, saying “good morning” and “good evening”, and other prompts.

As usual, the star here is the Alexa tie-in, with Routines that can trigger a number of actions between compatible smart home devices, play audio from other Alexa devices, and push notifications from compatible smart doorbells.

The square 2.83-inch, 240 x 320-pixel touchscreen isn’t designed for things like video calling or streaming video, but it can still control music playback or display some controls for when you want to turn a light on or off using Alexa.

We’ll have to test it to find out if it’s a worthy return for a device that disappeared after 2019, but at least this time you won’t have to make the decision to mount the camera in your bedroom if you’re looking to buy one.