Gadgetory

let's say you're all set to enjoy your favorite jerk sauce on a piece of leftover pizza but some jerk already use the last of it well with the Amazon one you can scan the barcode to add more to your shopping cart then have more sense straight to your door it's the latest brick and Amazon's ever-expanding online retail fortress and the idea is to grease the skids and make it as easy as possible for people to order their groceries online for delivery to that end it only costs $20 and even pays for itself thanks to a twenty dollar online grocery credit that comes as part of the deal the most interesting thing about the wand though might be the fact that it's an Amazon Alexa enabled device and the most inexpensive one to date at less than half the cost of an Amazon echo dot it isn't always listening for a wake word like the echo dot though you have to press a button to say your command like this a lexan ad toilet paper to my shopping cart in addition to shopping you can ask Alexa for the weather to tell you a joke or even to access any one of the thousands of Alexa third-party skills you can also control compatible smart home gadgets just like this turn off the kitchen lights there are some limitations though you can't stream music with the Amazon wand and you can't ask Alexa to set reminders either you also can't ask Alexa to set a timer or an alarm which is a bit of a bummer since that timer feature is really popular for people who use Alexa in the kitchen and this is primarily a kitchen gadget something else I wonder is this thing too kid-friendly I have two nephews up in Ohio who love Star Wars they love the lightsabers the laser blasters all of it and I can just imagine them running around the house playing with this thing scanning every barcode in sight there's also a question of whether or not people are ready to dive in deeper with online grocery shopping Amazon is making big waves here with the recent acquisition of Whole Foods for almost 14 billion dollars but it's unclear how the wand might tie-in still the wand is really easy to use it works reliably well and it's tantalizingly cheap even if you ignore the barcode scanner altogether and just keep it on your fridge as an extra alexa access point to turn your lights on and off I think it's well worth 20 bucks and you