Anker, maker of your favorite... everything, and Alexa, which is quietly winning the smart assistant race, together at last. Launched under Anker’s home brand, Eufy, the Genie starts at $35- the lowest price so far on Amazon’s analog, the Dot, while the specs comparison is a mixed bag. I covered my condo in four of them for testing.
Beyond the price delta, weighing the feature set of Genie and Dot is going to involve context around your personal use cases. First off, the Genie does not support Bluetooth, though it does, on paper, produce better sound than the Dot. But you shouldn’t be using either to play music- get an Anker speaker, SONOS, pretty anything would be a massive upgrade, but again, this is all about how you want to use these products.
The Genie also doesn’t support 5GHz networks. While this grinds my gears, we get products in to test on a daily basis, and the majority don’t support 5GHz yet. This isn’t nearly as unforgivable as say, a portable device that doesn’t charge over USB, which still happens constantly, and it’s really only notable because the Dot does support 5GHz.
The Genie is taller and wider than the Dot, and glossy instead of matte, which we subjectively don’t like, though since there’s no reason to ever touch an Alexa product, fingerprints aren’t an issue here.
Setup is trivial (I did four of them in a couple minutes), but you will need to download the EufyHome app (separate from the EufyLife app) in order to get things going.
If you were planning to buy a Dot to use as a Bluetooth speaker, you should definitely stick with buying a Dot, but pretty much everyone else should get a Genie. Amazon’s thesis in splitting the Echo into Tap and Dot was to lower the barrier to entry of putting Alexa in every room, and the Genie takes that even further. If you’re paying full price, you can get three Genies for less than the cost of two Dots, and once there’s a deal, well, Eufy Genies will cost less than a New York City lobster roll soon.