Review: Amazon Tap

Sunday morning, lying in bed after a wine-soaked Saturday in Monterey, I rolled over and did what I do most mornings (no, not that): I asked Alexa the weather. Normally, my Amazon Echo chirps to life at the sound of its name and provides a quick forecast, but this, nothing. Which was weird, because the Echo always hears me. It's kind of amazing, actually. Then the wine fog cleared and I remembered oh, right, this is the Amazon Tap. I reached over and pressed the button on the side of the cylindrical black speaker on my nightstand, and five lights blinked blue. "What's the weather?" I asked. Then came the forecast.

That's basically the entire story of the Amazon Tap. It boils down to three things: It is battery powered and portable, which is why I tossed it in my bag and left it unplugged on the nightstand in my Airbnb. Instead of Echo's magical far-field voice recognition, you press the button every time you want something. And last, it is in every other way exactly the same as the Echo. It's a Bluetooth speaker with superpowers. It's Alexa for your overnight bag—a wonderful idea, in a not-quite-wonderful speaker.

When Amazon announced the Tap and the tiny Echo Dot adapter, senior vp of devices Dave Limp showed them off in a room littered with Bluetooth speakers. They included a handful of UE Booms, the fantastic and popular speakers that clearly provided Amazon with, um, a lot of design inspiration. This thing looks exactly like a UE Boom: tall and cylindrical, like a slightly shrunken can of tennis balls, with a mesh cover. It weighs just a touch over a pound, plenty light enough to go into a weekend bag. The speaker is black, but Amazon sells a handful of colored rubber covers that are ugly and cumbersome and should only be purchased if you're in the habit of dropping speakers from tall buildings and need extra protection.

Even leaving aside all the Alexa-related coolness, the Tap has some big advantages over other Bluetooth speakers. There are playback buttons on the top, so you can quickly change songs or the volume. An audio-in port means you can use it even if your signal is wonky or your device isn't Bluetooth-y. You can charge it directly via Micro USB and wirelessly through the included base station, which you should leave on your nightstand and drop the Tap into every now and then. Amazon claims the battery lasts at least the nine hours, by the way, so charging isn't much of an issue. In many ways, Amazon grabbed the best and most useful features from all of the Bluetooth speakers it sells and dropped them into a single device. (Clearly that is exactly what it did.) The Tap is by a wide margin the most practical, thoughtfully made, usable Bluetooth speaker I've used.

There's only one downside: the Tap doesn't sound nearly as good as a UE Boom or any other high-end Bluetooth speaker. You won't notice if you're used to a phone speaker or whatever crappy Jambox knock-off you might have lying around, but the Tap doesn't offer the expansive or resonant sound of its competitors. I love the Boom because it sounds so much better, so much fuller, so much bigger than you expect. The Echo sounds exactly like the medium-sized, medium-priced Bluetooth speaker it is.

In exchange for this, you get Alexa. All the timer-setting, weather-knowing, score-reporting, shopping-list-keeping, Spotify-playing, Uber-calling, pizza-ordering goodness that is Alexa. As long as you're connected to Wi-Fi, the Tap can do anything the Echo can. (As long as you remember to press that button.) The Wi-Fi is the trick, though; since it connects to the Internet directly and not through your phone, the Tap needs to be set up all over again every time you get to a new place with a new network. You can always tether the Tap to your phone, which is bad for phone battery life but by far the most seamless experience. Otherwise, you'll spend three minutes setting up everywhere you go—friend's house, work, Airbnb. You can use the speaker through Bluetooth anywhere, but the Alexa features only work when the Tap has Wi-Fi.

Once it's set up, even if you just want music, the Tap is a great party guest. It won't drop the connection if your phone walks out of the room, for one thing. Finding music is easy; now that Alexa integrates with Spotify, you can play any of its great playlists, search for songs, anything. And the button-press thing is actually a win in a crowd: the Echo loves to hear the "Alexa" wake word when you're not saying it, and not having false-positives during a party is a really nice thing. It sucks when I'm in the kitchen, a room away, and my hands are dirty, but that's what the Echo's for.

I have a wish list of features for the Tap. I wish it would turn on the far-field voice recognition when it was plugged in and battery issues aren't an issue. I wish it sounded a little better—I'll probably end up buying an Echo Dot, too, which lets you connect Alexa to any speaker you like. I wish it got just a bit louder, to really fill a big room. But it already checks more boxes than just about any other Bluetooth speaker on the market, even ones that cost a lot more than $130. And thanks to Alexa, it's both more powerful and more self-sufficient than anything that looks like it. It's already earned a permanent spot in my weekend bag.