Amazon’s new Echo Time has a surprisingly good reason to exist

• Amazon’s Echo Time is a smart clock with Alexa+ and a 3.2-inch display
• A camera-free design and customizable clock faces set it apart
• Sensors and adaptive lighting aim to improve your wake-up routine

Amazon has long offered a wide variety of smart speakers and smart displays, all powered by Alexa, and more recently, many have gotten the upgrade to Alexa+. Now, after several new devices, from Kindles to tablets with a glare-free Nano Matte coating, Amazon has five more, and the most intriguing is the $199 / £184.99 / AU$379 Echo Time.

A device that earns a spot on your bedside table needs to clear a high bar, and the devices team at Amazon, led by Panos Panay, thinks they’ve cracked it with this one. Speaking to press and creators, Panos called the Echo Time the ‘smartest clock in the world,’ and, first and foremost, it’s meant to show you the time in a range of ways.

It really presents itself as a more well-thought-out Echo Spot. Rather than a half-circle display, the Echo Time offers a 3.2-inch screen wrapped in what looks like the body of an Echo Dot Max, with woven mesh on the rear, top, and sides. Controls sit at the top, just above the woven mesh, for volume up, volume down, and microphone mute. It does have microphones you can mute, but the Time notably doesn’t have a camera.

That’s a refreshing admission for a device designed for your nightstand and will likely make the Time more popular than the Spot.

Instead, Echo Time aims to mix clock skills with Alexa+. Like the previous Echo Spot and the forthcoming Apple HomeView, you can customize it with a range of clock faces and even add mini widgets. I saw several designs that look like traditional clocks, with or without hands or numbers, as well as digital ones and others that use photos.

There are some collaborative designs pulling from famous characters like Harry Potter or the Powerpuff Girls — I am hoping for some Disney, Star Wars, or Marvel ones one day. You can swipe left or right to adjust the clock face and long-press to swipe between and customize them.

It can, as you might suspect, function as an alarm clock, but Amazon takes this a step further, as it can raise or lower the brightness of the display and glow light at the bottom to help with your wind-down or wake-up routine. For instance, rather than blaring a loud horn as your alarm, it can intelligently raise the display brightness and work with connected smart home gadgets, like a smart bulb, to help ease your wake-up. It can gradually raise the brightness like a sunrise, and at night, it could start to dim things and even cut blue light from the display. At night, the display can drop to as low as 0.3 nits, meaning that the glow won’t keep you up and the screen can be viewed without burning your retinas.

It will also utilize Omnisense to find the best time to wake you up if you opt in, which is different from Soli on, say, the Google Nest Hub or the Hatch Sleep Clock with sleep tracking. Echo Time isn’t looking to track your sleep but is using these sensors — room temperature, presence detection, ultrasound for breathing, and proximity — to figure out when you’re in a state of lighter sleep and start to wake you up. From there, when an alarm is set, Alexa and the Echo Time can make the call to sound it earlier.

And since it’s running Alexa+, you don’t need to be precise with your asks. You could tell Alexa you have an important meeting at 9 AM, so you need to be up by 7:30 or 7:45 AM, and have it figure out the best routine, potentially setting an alarm but also cueing the lights and hopefully easing you into your day.

With its built-in speakers and screen, you can ask Alexa topical questions and even request music playback, and the Echo Time will happily oblige. It seems like a fully capable Alexa smart display, but it’s unlike the rest of the Echo Show or the standard Echo lineup. Echo Time is squarely built around being a digital clock with Alexa capabilities. And that’s a good thing.

Instead of trying to be another smart display that does a little bit of everything, it offers a camera-free design, customizable clock faces, and smart features designed to help you start your day or ease into slumber. It’s a more purpose-built Echo, and that could be exactly what makes it worth the space on your nightstand.

At $199.99, it is the same price as the Echo Show 8 and more than the Echo Spot at $109.99. That puts it in an interesting spot in the lineup, and I’m looking forward to spending more time with it soon. Its price puts it firmly in premium smart-clock, smart display territory, so it’ll be interesting to see whether its added features justify the cost over other Echo devices.

Amazon’s also dropping the Amazon Kids Echo Time at $209.99 / £194.99 in Galactic Grape — my favorite — or Cosmic Lime, and it comes bundled with a year of Amazon Kids+. The standard Echo Time comes in Graphite, Glacier White, and Coral Pink for $199.99. Both are available to order now and are shipping now.

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