In our home we have every single Alexa device imaginable. Except of course the silly microwave.
I like the idea of having a ring right at my hand to just bark orders into. Especially when coming home at night, and wanting complete access of my home. We have Smart bulbs, smart Outlets, and smart TVs. I thought it would be extremely neat to just be able to turn lights on from the car in the driveway before I even got out. Whether or not that's worth the $140 that I paid, after taxes, it's still undetermined.
The first thing that I was prompted to do was to order the sizing kit for the ring. This is basically a box of Prototype plastic rings that you are to wear on your finger for the day, before actually ordering the size. This box of plastic Rings arrived within 24 hours, in the sizes of small medium large and extra-large.
I decided to get the ring that fit my middle finger best because I don't like things on my pointer finger. My fiance who is a male, was able to fit the extra large one on his middle finger. He has large middle fingers, and this ring size was roughly a size 12. That is as large as it gets. Anyone with larger fingers your s*** out of luck.
After ordering the sizing kit and deciding on my ring size, I really sat there for a moment to contemplate whether or not I actually needed this ring. It wasn't free, but I would obviously be offering feedback and reviews, and this is probably why Amazon chose me as an invite only.
I felt sort of duped, that these weren't sent to us for a even deeper discount, considering the fact that this feels like it's in a prototype stage. I basically feel like a guinea pig, without any payment. In fact I'm paying them, and offering vital feedback for whether or not this Echo Loop will actually launch properly. I can only hope it's nowhere near as terrible as the echo Auto.
So today, 4 days after choosing my ring size my Echo loop finally arrived.
It came in a yellow bubble wrap envelope that look like it had been beat up a few thousand times before it arrived to my door. I was a little less than pleased with that.
Inside of the yellow envelope contained a very small square box. It didn't seem nearly as lucrative as past devices. I didn't mind though, I opened it up and was greeted with a beautiful blue card insert, with my beautiful ring sitting right there. It looked exactly like the plastic prototype ring, only made with black metals. It felt far more high quality than I was expecting.
Inside of the belly of that box I found the charging cradle, and a USB wire. Unfortunately it does not come with a USB charging Outlet you have to have one of those already. I thought that was strange considering how cheap they actually are and considering the high price of this ring I assumed it would actually come with it. When this ring is released it will cost $179
Right now, the ring is sitting on it's charging cradle. I'm sitting here patiently waiting for it to be fully charged. Once it is fully charged and ready to go I will be updating this very post. So please stay tuned
So this is where we had some major gripes. Infuriating ones to be honest.
I woke up to find my echo loop was only at a 20% charge. I left it on the cradle all night. The button on top of topnofhe charger were flashing yellow and all was working well. However it must have dropped connection to the charger and drained the battery throughout the night.
I found this issue to be a repetitive one. The 3 small metal plates inside of the ring that are supposed to make contact to the charger metal contact plates slip up a lot and don't make a good connection. I deeply feel amazon needs to correct this before launching the echo loop to the public.
The cradle is flawed. Big time.
The next issue upon waking up and recharging was that the echoloop was no longer connected to the Alexa app..so it was as if my app dropped the device and in had to contact customer service for help
Unfortunately they couldn't fix the issue and was sending me out a new ring. I thwarted that when I figured out how to reset the ring on my own. Thank god in am tech savvy.
I had to unpaired the device from Bluetooth and deactivate from the app..then in had to factory reset the echo loop which was didficult and was not included in the manual on how to factory reset. .I hope amazon adds this in the manual when the loop launches to the public.
After a grueling few hours my echo loop was back and running. It has dropped the Bluetooth a few times more than I'd like, but I resolved the issue myself so far.
Once I was good to go I made 2 calls using the echo loop. The calls worked flawlessly. However I was unable to connect it when I had incoming calls. I'm not sure if that is even a feature. BUT since it advertises as incoming and outgoing calls it should work. I have yet to get incoming calls transfer from phone to loop, although I can Mae outgoing calls on it.
I will toy with toy this more tomorrow or call customer service for some insight.
All in all, just a few hours toying with the device and we are off to a rocky start. I can hope tomorrow goes better than today did. I spent more toyhisime troubleshooting today, than I did enjoying the new device.
Day 3
I kept my phone nearby all day. I found that whenever I walk too far away from the phone and Bluetooth lost its connection, that was when the echoloop would have its most problems.
When I visited my mother's house, and ended up on her WiFi, I once again lost the connection. Which prompted me to have to pair it up once again using Bluetooth on my phone. That wasn't a big deal, however when I got home later on that afternoon I lost the connection to the Alexa app again. My frustrations were so high at this point that I decided to reach out to customer service yet again. I asked if developers were updating the software to make sure the echo Loop did not lose its connection to the Amazon Alexa application. Unfortunately none of them had an answer for me, the only thing they tried to do was to have me send the ring back. It was absolutely infuriating.
So as of today, if developers don't get this situation ironed out there is no way in hell this echoloop should ever be released to the General Public. It's so close to being that really neat Hi-Tech device, but unfortunately as it is right now, I wouldn't be able to recommend it
