Amazon just announced its newest smart alarm clock — the Echo Time. The baseball-sized smart speaker with a screen, the Time looks like an Echo Dot with Clock and an Echo Spot had a much bigger baby. It features a 3.2-inch touchscreen that prominently displays your choice of a huge selection of clockfaces and includes a sleep-sensing feature that promises to rouse you at just the right time in your sleep cycle to help you feel more rested. It costs $199.99 and is available to order now.

I spent some time with the Time at Amazon’s event in New York City and was impressed by several upgrades over the Spot, one of my favorite smart alarm clocks. The biggest is that you can set an alarm using the touchscreen, so you won’t wake your partner when you try to set one with your voice late at night.

The Time’s screen is an upgrade over the Spot’s 2.83-inch version: It’s fully round, whereas the Spot uses a cramped semicircle, and it shows a much bigger clock, which improves glanceability across the room.

The Time also prioritizes the clock at all times, so no matter what you ask Alexa to do — turn the lights on, play music, show you who’s at your video doorbell (on a very tiny screen) — it will revert to the clock as soon as the action is completed. If you’re playing music and have a timer running, small icons above the clock let you tap into them for more detail while keeping the clock visible.

The Time’s screen can dim down to under 0.3 nits. I saw this demoed, and it was barely visible in a very bright room, which is impressive, but I’ll have to get it on my bedside table to really test it.

Like the Spot, the Time has no camera, making it more suitable to put on your bedside table than an Echo Show. It does add an ultrasound transducer to the Dot’s ultrasound sensor, which detects motion. Combined, these enable a new smart alarm feature that uses the sensors to track your breathing and small movements to estimate your sleep stage, and wake you at an optimal moment up to an hour before your alarm goes off. Sleep sensing is opt-in, and you can quickly disable it by pressing the mute button.

If you’re a serial snoozer, the Time has a selection of special alarm tones that start quietly and “build energy” every time you hit that snooze button (by tapping the top of the speaker or by telling Alexa to snooze), to help make waking up less painful.

If you don’t like waking up to loud noises, the Time has a sunrise wake-up feature that gradually brightens the clockface with warm colors to help you wake up. This seemed very subtle in the demo I saw, but the room was brightly lit. If the Time were right next to your face, I could see it being effective for light sleepers.

The Time has the same hardware as the new Echo Dot, also announced this week, so it features a built-in smart home hub (Zigbee, Thread, and Matter), meaning you can pair smart lights in your room with it to brighten them along with the clockface. I’ve been using light to wake up for several years now and can’t imagine going back to a jarring alarm.

Amazon went all out on clockface options with Time; there are hundreds to choose from, and you can customize them to your heart’s content. The Time also comes in pink, black, or white, and there are two jazzy kids’ editions in galactic grape and cosmic lime.

These cost $209.99 and include a year of Amazon Kids Plus, which features a Sleep Studio that provides guided bedtime routines that prompt your kids to put on their PJs and brush their teeth. It also offers Wind Down prompts and can slowly dim the lights. The kids’ clockfaces feature cute animated characters, plus analog faces for kids learning to tell time.

On paper, the Time fixes many of the Spot’s problems and feels like a more polished device — and at nearly twice the price, it should be. My main concern is its size; it feels a hair too large for a bedside clock, though it’s smaller than the popular Hatch Restore. That’s a big screen for the bedside — though not as big as your phone — and if it could replace that on your bedside table, I can see it being a useful gadget. An optional stand ($39.99) lets you adjust the screen angle and makes it feel less bulky, but I’ll have to test it in my bedroom before making a final verdict.

Photos by Jennifer Pattison Tuohy / The Verge