Review: Amazon Glow
Postmortem [June 2023]
The Amazon Glow was announced in late 2021 and went on sale in March, 2022. Six months after launch, Amazon stopped sales, and stopped supporting the device entirely by the end of the year. What happened?
Amazon failed to explain the value proposition. As noted in our review (left unchanged below), the Glow was difficult to describe. It seemed like a video conferencing device with a gimmicky projection system tacked on, and smartphones have video calling capabilities, so why buy a dedicated device? In reality, the Glow was designed to foster interaction that video calls lack, but that turned out to be a hard sell.
Timing wasn’t the primary problem, but it didn’t help. The Amazon Glow seemed like a perfect device for 2020 lockdowns …that started shipping in 2022, when people were able to visit friends and family in person again.
Post pandemic, Amazon cut investment in hardware across the board, and killed multiple product lines that had no path to market impact. Direct profitability isn’t always a metric Amazon uses for its hardware, as it often chooses to sell devices at cost to drive content sales, subscription revenues, or just make Amazon Prime stickier. The Halo brand of health trackers was the most obvious victim of this cost-cutting, but Glow was an easy target. If Halo had garnered a small but vocal and growing following, it is possible that Amazon would have stuck with it to build it into the gaming platform it could have become. That didn’t happen.
Device for Remote Family Members to Bond with Children, Gets Boost With Prime Day Pricing
Amazon’s Glow is a new product category that is hard to describe but delightful to experience, and can grow with your child as Amazon adds content, games, and capabilities. The Glow’s sole drawback – a relatively high price due to the amount of technology included – was mitigated during Prime Days, as Amazon sold it for $150, less than half its $330 launch price.
Techsponential is an analyst firm, not a consumer reviews site. To maintain objectivity, Techsponential does not participate in Amazon’s affiliate fee program. Our goal is to analyze new products and technologies; we then advise manufacturers, retailers, carriers, and ecosystem partners on products, direction, and marketing. If an individual consumer buys something based on our research, we do not profit from it.
Summary
I tested Amazon’s Glow both before launch in 2021 and again with a production unit this year. However, the timing of this review is not coincidental: the Amazon Glow was a worthy product at its original launch price of $330, but at Amazon Prime Day pricing of less than half that, it deserves a lot more attention.
What is it?
Amazon’s Glow – which is a distinct product from Amazon’s “Echo Glow” IoT night light – is a hardware and software platform that was seemingly perfectly timed for a pandemic. It helps connect children with remote family members by doing engaging activities together, which is much more effective at keeping kids talking – and creating real bonds – than video conferencing alone. The Amazon Glow represents an entirely new product category, which presents a marketing and sales challenge. Technically, the Glow is a video conferencing gameplay system with a touchscreen-like projection mat that can be used by any close family member with a phone or tablet to remotely read with, play with, and chat with children. Its content and activities span different age groups, though the current configuration is best for children aged 4 - 9. The initial purchases will come from parents seeking to connect their children with their parents – with some Amazon Glows purchased by the grandparents themselves to give as self-serving gifts.
Pricing and Perspective
Price per se was not the gating factor for the Amazon Glow – consumers highly value the problem it solves – but it is a new product category, and children’s toys are generally under $100. While Amazon has not released sales figures for the Glow, I suspect that it was a tough sell at its launch price of $330 because Amazon did not invest in a big consumer marketing push: most people don’t know that it exists. If they did discover it, they might still be confused as to what it does. It looks somewhat similar to an Echo Show, and consumers may be forgiven if they assume that it requires a pair of Glows to make a connection at twice the expense (in fact, there is no current way to connect two Glows to each other). Amazon clearly dispels these assumptions on its product page, but you need to know to get there and read it. There is also a subscription element beyond the initial hardware investment. This isn’t as bad as it sounds; it is the same Amazon Kids+ content which has plenty of value outside the Glow, only costs $5/month, and the first year is included as part of the initial purchase.
The Glow contains a lot of technology; it is essentially a connected tablet with a projector, gesture recognition system, a custom mouse pad, and loads of custom software and content. It is unclear whether Amazon can realistically afford to sell the Glow at Amazon Prime Day pricing long term, but it is also unrealistic for Amazon to revert to full price after the sale.
Setup and First Impressions
While I thought that the monolith-like Glow looked a bit odd when I unboxed the prototype, my eight year old, said, “this is cool. This is a cool-looking device.” Months later it still looks unusual to me, and he still proudly shows it off to friends.
Setup requires a separate phone or tablet, which ensures that you have the Glow app installed on a remote device, but that is probably not the main device you’ll end up using to connect to the Glow remotely. I didn’t run into any setup issues, though the process was truncated because we already had child profiles set up for various FireHD tablets that Amazon Glow used. My son was delighted that Amazon Glow automatically loaded the books he had been reading on his tablet. Not all families will have kids profiles and a full Amazon Kids+ ecosystem already set up, so the process will necessarily be longer for most consumers, but it was nice to see how well integrated it is for those who have been using Amazon’s Kids+ content regularly beforehand.
When my son put his finger on the projected play button on the mat to start the welcome video, he quickly realized the mat was a touchable, controllable surface, and he broke out into a huge smile. When it works, the projection touchscreen system seems like magic. However, it doesn’t work 100% of the time, and today’s consumers are conditioned to pixel-precise capacitive touchscreens. Ironically, I found that kids are much more forgiving than older users when glitches occurred. Kids may be conditioned by iPads, but they are also hardwired to try again when things don’t work as expected.
Content and Activities
Reading projected books: This was the first activity we tried. My son exclaimed that it was, “SO COOL!” He did eventually go back to reading Kids+ content on his FireHD tablet so that he could read in other places around the house, but this was an early win for the system. We tried reading books together but my son (now nine) is simply too old for that. However, I suspect that this will be a key use case and possibly a purchase driver for many remote parents and grandparents of smaller children.
Watching videos: Video have not been a hit with my son on the Fire HD, and wasn’t much better received here. Video fidelity was just OK, audio was hard to hear and adjust, and my son kept insisting that we turn the lights off for better contrast, which was not well received by everyone else using the dining room. However, the biggest problem with videos is child-specific: my son likes the Kids+ book selection a lot better than the videos on offer. Other children, especially younger ones, will find plenty to watch.
Art: Amazon has included multiple types of art projects in the Amazon Glow, and while my son was not enthralled with any of them, I thought that this could be a huge hit as a collaborative experience for younger and more artistic children.
Games: There are a wide variety of games on the Glow, and Amazon has added more content since launch. The simplest games are often the most successful in generating lasting connection, as adult-child conversations naturally get layered on top of gameplay. Marbles is my son’s current favorite game, with chess a close second. Jigsaw-style puzzles were an early addictive hit, despite frustrating mechanics of the drag and drop system (this is an app where a proper touchscreen is easier and significantly more accurate than the projection system). Some activities include the ability for the system to recognize and incorporate physical objects placed on the mat, which seems like science fiction for adults, but didn’t seem unusually impressive to jaded children.
The most surprising hit – given my child’s age – were matching games. A key discovery was that you can only unlock certain boards if you play with someone else, so he roped me into playing with him, and then my 14 year old demanded that he get a turn, and stole the tablet so that the two of them could play together. They played for hours, with a fair amount of G-rated trash talking, and returned to this activity multiple times over the following days.
Video calls: Consumers don’t really need Amazon Glow for standalone video conferencing; everyone has smartphones with video chat capabilities already. Still, this is a core function for the device, though it can require an actual call beforehand to ensure that both parties are ready, and at that point, you could just use the phone.
Privacy
Any device aimed at children that includes connectivity and a camera is going to raise privacy concerns, but Amazon Glow is about as private and secure as it really could be. Amazon Glow is not an Echo device: it does not have Alexa. The microphone is only on when a call is connected, and the camera can be easily shuttered closed; that shutter also turns off the microphone. Only approved people can call Amazon Glow. Amazon Glow does not have an Internet browser, advertising, or in-app purchases on the device.
Room for Improvement
The remote parent or friend always has a good view of the child using the Amazon Glow, but the child often has a poor or non-existent view of the remote participant depending on the location of the tablet’s camera, orientation of the display, and especially the angle. At times it can be hard for the remote participant to play a game or draw while holding the tablet at the correct angle when there is no visual indicator of what the child is seeing.
Amazon Glow needs to be added to Amazon’s parental controls portal with Amazon Glow-specific settings. One of the reasons that my son uses the Amazon Glow to play games solo for hours on end is because nothing stops him! Amazon seems to think that projecting a screen onto a mat is not a screen, and maybe there aren’t the same blue light concerns, but parents are still going to consider it a screen.
Some parents will set up the Amazon Glow in a central location, playroom, or child’s bedroom and leave it there. However, others will want to put it away, and Amazon Glow wasn’t really designed for that. Amazon Glow would benefit from a handle on the back for portability, along with an optional storage case for the main unit, mat, and power supply.
There is no provision for local multiplayer. During a recent playdate, my kid solved that problem by insisting that I set up the Glow app on his tablet. He then gave the tablet to his classmate, sat him down on the other side of the house (any closer and there were echoes from the microphone and speakers), and the two of them happily played chess. Could they have played chess together on a physical chessboard? Yes. Could they have played chess together on the tablet? Yes. They wanted to use the Glow. And then they played Marbles for an hour and we had to turn it off to get them to go outside.
There is also no way to connect one Glow to another, which should make for a much better experience than Amazon Glow + tablet app; at the very least, the remote participant will always be in view.
The Future of Glow?
While it looks like a video conferencing system with activities tacked on, Amazon Glow is more of a generational remote game console. That means that Amazon needs to promote it like a game console. It will also need to continually expand the interactive gaming content available for the Amazon Glow. Our positive experience – and glowing five star reviews on the site – suggests that the games and activities included today are sufficient, especially for younger children. However, I’d really like to see games that extend the life of the product and keep kids and remote users coming back. For younger children: Sorry, Life, Backgammon, Othello, Uno, Monopoly. For tweens and teens: Ticket to Ride, Settlers of Catan, Scrabble. If Amazon Glow can be expanded to multiple remote users, it would make a terrific Texas Hold’em poker system and D&D platform.
There are ample opportunities to scale Amazon Glow into the tween and teen ages, and I sincerely hope that Amazon both offers a discount for deployed members of the military, and makes a version for children’s hospitals that can is inherently safe for oxygen-rich environments, can be sanitized, and remotely managed.
To discuss the implications of this report on your business, product, or investment strategies, contact Avi at avi@techsponential.com or +1 (201) 677-8284.