<Ignore - Probably Incorrect Info>
Usable without any important limitations. I have five in HK (between home, office). Never bothered to proxy it since I never experienced any restrictions on my music or other usage (I like to play 'Jeopardy' as well as have ambient noise piped in).
The only difference is that you cannot set the 'location' to HK (or any other non-US locale, as far as I'm aware), so, for instance, if you ask for a weather report, she'll give you one for whatever part of the US she thinks you're from. But if you say "Alexa, tell me the weather report for Hong Kong," it's ok.
I'm sitting a few feet from one of my Alexas as I type this...
@BrightSum - thanks for the clarifications. I'll play around over the weekend and take the device off the VPN. I forget what stopped working for us originally when I connected the devices without a VPN.
Happy I finally found something I can speak authoritatively about! I have an Alexa on for many hours a day.
I've gotten to the point that I have almost literally every song that I've ever liked in my music playlist, so that I keep my ears peeled at bars and so forth in a quest to add new songs.
The only one of my favorite artists whose music I cannot get from Amazon Unlimited is Peter Gabriel. They have his songs, but they are all live. Must be some licensing issue. I added Spotify on a trial and will not continue it. Doesn't bring any songs I need.
But yes: as an example, I brought one of my Echo Dots to a friend's office in Central last night along with my Bluetooth speaker and we had music for a small gathering (possibly even less relevant to the topic, but my speaker, a Vava Voom, has a pretty good battery and you can plug Alexa into it for a completely unplugged, as it were, experience--rocks for the price and size, too).
So, in my experience, proxying wouldn't buy you much, if anything, since she'd still think she was in the US! There have been rumors AMZN will allow international localization, but it doesn't make a heck of a lot of diff to the way I use it.
Does anyone know where in Hong Kong I can buy a replacement power supply for an Echo Plus 2nd gen? The 2 pin usa plug that came with the device got fried and I'm not going back to USA until Q4 this year. Thanks for any advice on hk retailers.
you can get 15v and 1400mah/1.4a (milliampes can be more, but never less required amount), commonly avalibe in ap liu st, shops like RS electronics or integral safety sells these for around HK$60-110
https://www.amazon.com/Adapter-Gener.../dp/B07DK8GY7H