Amazon’s 2023 Echo Show 8 is back to $90, plus the rest of this week’s best tech deals

Amazon’s upgraded Echo Show 8 display has a sleeker design and faster Alexa responses, and right now it’s down to $90, which is 40 percent off and the lowest price we’ve seen. This is the third-generation of the 8-inch smart display, which we saw during Amazon’s device-and-service focused event last fall at its recently opened HQ2 in Arlington, Virginia. The 2023 Echo Show 8 has spatial audio with room calibration that should make for fuller sound and the new Adaptive Content feature adjusts what’s on display depending on how far away you are. When you’re across the room, the display shows the time and weather. Get closer and you’ll see personalized content like news stories and your calendar details. 

The iRobot Roomba Combo j7+ is now on sale for $300 off. That’s a discount we’ve seen before, but previously with a coupon code. The mop-and-vacuum combo is the top 2-in-1 pick in our guide to the best robot vacuums. Not only does it suck up dirt from carpets and rugs, it can clean hard floors with its retractable mop. With a $1,000 list price, this is indeed a luxury purchase. Even at $699, it’s not cheap. But our in our tests, we found it worked as advertised with strong suction power. Plus it comes with a good dose of “smarts” — including the ability to avoid obstacles and know when it’s on carpets versus smooth flooring. It runs between 90 and 180 minutes on a charge before returning to its (self-emptying base).    

If you’d prefer a more affordable way to keep your floors clean, our top budget pick for a robo vac, iRobot’s Roomba 694 is still on sale for $160. That’s a price it’s been hitting for a couple of months now, but still an all-time low for a basic but reliable floor cleaner. 

Many of Anker’s battery packs and chargers are on sale right now at Amazon. The sale includes a record low of $31.49 on the Anker 334 MagGo MagSafe battery pack, which goes for $45 at full price. It charges compatible iPhones with the MagSafe attachment which the company says will get an iPhone 15 Pro 1.7 times over. I can also support pass through charging and can be recharged from the USB cable while wirelessly refilling your phone. 

One of our favorite power banks is also included. The Anker Prime 20,000mAh 200W power bank is down to a record low of $104, after you click the on-page 20 percent off coupon. The bank has two USB-C ports and one USB-A port capable of delivering a total charging output of 200W. There’s also a helpful display showing the bank’s current charge and output. And if you opt for the fancy compatible charging base, refilling the battery is as easy as setting it down. 

The top pick in our guide to Bluetooth trackers is the Chipolo One. And right now Chipolo is selling a bundle that includes two key-fob style trackers and one wallet tracker for $52, which is a $28 less than if you bought them each at full price. 

In our tests, the Chipolo rang louder than an AirTag and provided timelier separation alerts when we left items behind. Chipolo’s tracker will also work with Android phones. In short, they were the best day-to-day answer for the question “Where did I put my keys?” But if you’re looking for a crazy vast finding network so you can locate your lost things out on the mean city streets, you’d be better served with Apple’s tracker, if you’re an iPhone user, or Samsung’s SmartTag 2, if you have a Galaxy phone. Both trackers rely on the millions of handsets from their respective company.  

GE showed off the Profile Smart Indoor Smoker at CES earlier this month and it’s already $300 off at Amazon, bringing the price down to $699 from the $999 list price. In our opinion, it beat out all the other products we saw at the event and we named it best in show. 

Engadget’s Billy Steele had a chance to experience the results of the smoker himself and dubbed it delicious. Smoking meats is generally an outdoors-only activity, and the Profile gets around that by only using wood pellets to add smokey flavor, not power the cooking process. We were impressed with how well the built-in filtration system kept the smoke at bay. The mini-fridge-sized appliance has Wi-Fi connectivity for remote control and monitoring, and it can even keep smoked meats at food-safe temps for up to 24 hours. 

Another of our best in show picks from CES is also seeing an early discount. The EcoFlow DELTA Pro Ultra was indeed one of the coolest smart home gadgets we saw, but at $5,799, it’s not a cheap addition. A discount code takes $800 off the list price, making it just a shade more affordable. Enter EFDPU800 at checkout to see the savings. 

This is a whole-home battery and inverter set that can pull power from solar panels, or even suck up juice from the grid when it’s cheaper and feed it back when prices spike. It’s not the first whole-home battery on the market by any means, but the modular, stackable design means you can add more batteries as the need arises (and funds allow) to eventually get to a whopping 90kWh of storage — enough to keep AC cooled McMansions running at full tilt. If you’re lucky enough to be able to consider solar power for your home, Eco Flow’s new setup might be worth considering. 

EcoFlow is also hosting a winter sale, happening throughout the next week and includes up to 50 percent off portable solar panels, home batteries, bundles and accessories. Their portable home back-up battery, the EcoFlow DELTA Pro power station is $1,100 off and down to $2,599. The DELTA Pro is expandable like the DELTA Pro Ultra (though not in the same attractive stack) and can expand to 25kWh of power. A single unit provides 3.6kWh.    

These are likely the last few days to take advantage of Amazon’s offer for a free gift card when you pre-order the new Samsung Galaxy S24 phones. The company unveiled the new lineup last week, which includes the 6.2-inch Galaxy S24, the 6.7-inch Galaxy S24+ and the 6.8-inch Galaxy S24 Ultra. The phones ship January 31 and if you pre-order from its storefront, Amazon will include a $50, $150 or $200 digital gift card, depending on the model. Each has it’s own code to enter to get the deal, all of which appear on the product page. For reference, the codes are TTYSDPOR7WPL for the $800 Galaxy S24, MJ93PYFCJHOJ, for the $1,000 Galaxy S24+ and FEA7SP3UFDJN for the $1,300 Galaxy S24 Ultra . 

Both Samsung and Best Buy are also offering gift cards and store credit, in addition to up to $600 with a trade-in — the amount will depend on what model of smartphone you send in. Of course Verizon, T-Mobile and AT&T are advertising trade-in deals too, but those come tied to multi-year contracts for mobile service. 

You can see what we thought about the phones in our hands-on previews of the S24, S24+ and S24 Ultra (we were particularly struck by how heavily Samsung is leaning into AI-driven features in all three models) but our full reviews are still forthcoming, so it’s understandable if you want to wait until those come out.  

A number of Samsung’s Galaxy Book3 laptops are on sale at Amazon right now. That includes the 15.6-inch Galaxy Book3 with 16GB of RAM, 512GB of storage and a 13th-gen Intel Core i5 processor. As part of the sale, the Book3 is on sale for $700, down from $1,000 and represents a new low. 

We haven’t fully reviewed the Book3 laptops, (though we did get a brief hands-on session with the Ultra model and called it a beast of a machine). The standard Galaxy Book3 is decidedly leaner, without the NVIDIA RTX 4050 graphics card and a Core i5 instead of Core i7 processor. This one is marketed as an everyday work PC that’s easy to take on the road. It has a full HD screen, a claimed 12-hour battery life and a good array of ports, including two USB-C, two USB-C, a microSD card slot, an HDMI port and a headphone jack. And if you use a Samsung phone, the Galaxy Connected Experience should help you move your work seamlessly between devices.  

Apple’s latest AirPods Pro with USB-C charging are down to $189 from $249. The 24 percent discount matches their all-time low at Amazon. You can get them for a dollar more, or $190 at Best Buy. Not only are the AirPods Pro the best wireless earbuds for iPhone users, they’ll also work with the upcoming Vision Pro. The mixed reality headset is available now for pre-order, starting at $3,499 for the 256GB version. Two of our editors had a chance to try the Vison Pro, and you can check out their experience here.  

But even if you don’t plan to drop nearly four grand on a headset, the AirPods Pro will serve you well with good noise cancellation and one of the best transparancy modes on the market. You’ll get six hours of play even with noise canceling turned on and the charging case gives you up to 30 more hours.

As it was last week, the Apple Watch Series 9 is on sale for $329 at Amazon and Best Buy. The sale applies to the 41mm case with the Midnight, Pink or Starlight Sport Loop. That’s not quite the all-time low of $310, which it hit curiously after Black Friday last year, but it’s still $70 cheaper than full price and about $30 less than it’s sold for lately. 

The Series 9 is currently our top pick for a smartwatch thanks to its excellent health and fitness tracking abilities, its handy iPhone integration and the helpful emergency features. It also supports the Double Tap gesture for answering calls, stopping timers and doing other simple tasks. Overall, Engadget’s Cherlynn Low gave the watch a score of 92 in her review last September.

If you’ve been following Apple’s ongoing patent dispute, you may have heard that the company has had to disable the watch’s blood oxygen monitoring feature in order to keep selling the wearable, but that might not apply to models sold by third-party retailers like this one. But you’d need to check the watch’s part number to confirm whether it’s affected by the ban.

Kobo’s Elipsa 2E E Ink tablet and e-reader is currently $50 off at the manufacturer’s site, bringing the price down to $350. The tablet narrowly missed out on becoming our top pick for an e-reader E Ink tablet in our guide because the latency was just a touch longer than for Amazon’s Kindle Scribe. That and the slightly higher price. Now that it’s $50, it’s $10 cheaper than the Scribe. As for the latency, it was most noticeable during long handwriting sessions. If you plan to take a lot of handwritten notes, you may want to to go for the speediness of the Kindle, but if you’re simply jotting notes in the margins of books, you may not have an issue. And if writing in the margins of ebooks is why you want a read/write E Ink tablet, you’d be better off with the Kobo as you can write in the margins of most books, whereas the Scribe only allows marking up certain “Write-on Books” from the Kindle store.  

Apple’s compact desktop computer, the Mac mini M2 with 8GB of RAM and 512GB of storage is on sale for $676 when you clip a $53.01 on-page coupon. That beats the mini’s previous low and is about $25 less than it’s been selling for lately and $123 off the list price. The version with just 256GB of storage is also on sale. That’s down to $500 with an $80 on-page coupon. That’s $20 more than the the all-time low and and it’s often hit that price in the past few months, but it’s still $100 less than the list price.