If you got older dots floating around these things do Indeed work great.
I’ve had 3 of them in total and when they were working they were awesome because I could unplug them and have a portable speaker powered via Alexa.
Each of three I bought lasted a little over a year of being on 24/7. The weakness of this product is the battery contained within it. It’s low quality having tore one of these open.
The problem is if the battery is bad the unit will power off even if it’s plugged in as soon as the echo starts to draw some power.
Now you could be a cheap skate like me and just have a micro USB plugged into the speaker then unplug the micro USB cable going from the speaker to the echo and then run another wall powered micro USB to the echo.
So two powered micro USB plugs from the wall, that will make this work without the battery being good for a few more months but then one day the unit won’t power on at all.
If you do open up the speaker and look at the board you will see it’s always pulling it’s power from the battery even when plugged in which is the cheapest way you can build a speaker that can be unplugged and not lose power.
A better design would have been a MOSFET or Transistor with a current sensor that flipped over to the battery side if power was removed otherwise charge the battery and run the speaker off USB power if plugged in. If they had done then then a bad battery wouldn’t have resulted In a dead speaker even if plugged in.
For the price woot has these for this is acceptable, your basically paying a dollar per month from this speaker if it lasts a year like mine did.
Just try to mod the globular cloth-infested 4th gen Dot in a similar way!
For that matter, the 3rd gen Dot, while it remained a sane form factor, moved from a standard micro-USB power port to a proprietary one - no doubt due to heavier power requirements. Perhaps the 5th Gen Dot will revert to a more sane form factor and move to a standard USB-C power port if it needs the higher power.