Amazon is offering a great deal on its Echo Dot smart speaker today. You can pick up one for 99 cents—if you also pay for one month of Amazon Music Unlimited ($9.99 or $7.99 for Prime members). That service now includes high-resolution audio tracks at no additional cost.
This offer is available only to people who are new to the Echo ecosystem. If you already have an Echo or have activated one previously, or if you’ve currently or previously subscribed to Amazon Music Unlimited, you won’t be able to score this deal.
Click here to see the deal (you’ll need to sign into your Amazon account to see if you qualify).
The Echo Dot is our longtime favorite smart speaker in the budget category, and each generation—it’s now in its fourth—has improved in terms of design, audio performance, and overall capabilities. This new model features a spherical design similar to the full-size Echo. It’s wrapped in fabric and has an LED light ring at its base that communicates its status, flashing to alert you to messages, reminders, alarms, and notifications (such as when your Amazon order has arrived).
You can use the Echo Dot to play music from any streaming service. Amazon Music Unlimited offers more than 70 million tracks encoded in CD quality (16-bit resolution and a sampling rate of 44.1kHz), plus about 7 million tracks encoded in 24-bit resolution, along with more than 1,000 tracks encoded in Dolby Atmos and Sony 360 Reality Audio. You’ll need to step up to an Amazon Echo Studio or one of Sony’s own compatible speakers to listen to those. We were impressed with the former; not so much the latter.
If you find you’re not enjoying Amazon Music Unlimited for whatever reason, you’ll want to cancel your subscription before it automatically renews at $9.99 per month ($7.99 for Prime members).