Amazon’s latest Alexa-powered smart speaker, the Echo Pop, is a compact and affordable device that brings a fun and jaunty vibe to your home. Priced at $39.99, it’s a cheaper alternative to the $49.99 fifth-gen Echo Dot, albeit with a few compromises.

The Echo Pop’s design is its main selling point. Its semi-circular shape, along with its color options, makes it a delightful addition to any room. Despite its smaller size, it can still perform all the functions you’d expect from an Alexa-powered device – stream music, set timers, control smart home devices, and even play games.

One of the key features of the Echo Pop is Amazon’s AZ2 Neural Edge processor. This allows for more local processing of voice commands, making requests like “What time is it?” and “Turn off the lights” faster than non-AZ2 Echos.

The Echo Pop is the cheapest Echo speaker, with a list price of $40. As with all Echo speakers, it’s likely to see major price cuts as part of Amazon’s play to get its smart voice assistant into every room of your house. But remember, with inexpensive hardware comes many attempts to sell you stuff. While testing the Pop, I set an alarm that offered to upsell me on a louder alarm sound.

The Pop has all the same smart home radios as the Dot but lacks some of its more advanced sensors. There’s no temperature sensor or ultrasound motion detector, and the accelerometer that powers the tap-to-snooze feature only works for alarms, not for pausing and resuming music as the Dot can.

When it comes to sound quality, the Echo Pop is fine for listening to a podcast or the radio and acceptable for listening to music if you’re in a small room and sitting right next to it. It’s noticeably better when stereo paired with another Pop. But this is not a device to buy for banging tunes. While the Dot isn’t, either, and actually has a smaller front-firing speaker, it has a richer sound and better bass, so if that’s a consideration — spend the extra $10.

In terms of speed and performance, the Pop and the Dot have the same AZ2 Neural Edge processor, so execute most commands faster than older Echos. But the Dot responded marginally faster in side-by-side testing, picking up my voice quicker from farther away.

In conclusion, if you are already deep into an Alexa-powered smart home, the Pop makes sense for the one or two rooms where you can’t justify spending $50 on another speaker. It’s also a good upgrade for any aging early-gen Echos you still have. However, if you’re new to Amazon Alexa, get the Pop if you want to try out this smart speaker malarkey — $40 is a steal for a piece of tech that can do everything the Pop can.

The source of the information for the blog post is from a review of the Amazon Echo Pop on The Verge. You can read the full review here.