More from All the smart home news, reviews, and gadgets you need to know about
Powered by ultra-wideband, the next generation of smart locks will turn your phone into a key — that you never have to use.
The Wi-Fi Alliance and Thread Group have revealed they’re working with the CSA on several solutions to make sure your Wi-Fi router plays well with your smart home devices:
These include features like IPV 6 and multicast discovery, which we want to make sure are consistent and reliable across routers ... The way routers implement their multicast discovery can be broken, and that leads to a pretty bad experience for users ... We need to make Wi-Fi work reliably for all of the IoT use cases.
I’ve experienced network issues setting up Matter devices and keeping them online, and I’m not alone. If Matter can fix Wi-Fi routers, all will be forgiven.
Matter will be better in 2025 — say the people who make it
In an interview with The Verge, Vividh Siddha, director of engineering at Apple and president of Thread Group, shared another use case for the Thread radio in newer iPhones.
As well as allowing setup of a Thread device when you don’t have a Thread border router, the Thread radio in the iPhone lets you control devices when the power is out:
But the other important factor is the ability to use your accessories, and some important ones, like your front door lock when there’s a power outage. If you have no infrastructure — your Wi-Fi router is down, your Thread border router is down — and you still want the ability to get into your house or do other things that might be smart home related. Those are some use cases that it’s explicitly designed for, but it’s not limited to that.
Matter will be better in 2025 — say the people who make it
The radar-based technology can detect movements as slight as breathing, so it won’t turn the lights out on you when you’re sitting on the couch.
Superior to PIR sensing, mmWave is seeing fast adoption, with Samsung seemingly poised to add it to its appliances. Here’s a great explainer from The Ambient on how the tech could help your smart home.
The CSA, Thread Group, and Wi-Fi Alliance say they’re working to fix the biggest problems with the smart home standard. In this exclusive interview, I ask them how and when.
SmartWings, one of the first to offer Matter over Thread smart shades, has another first. Today, the company announced its Matter over Ethernet smart shades, which use a single cable to provide power and connectivity — no batteries, Thread, or Wi-Fi required.
Matter compatibility means the shades, which come in roller, zebra, and woven styles, will work with Apple Home, Google Home, SmartThings, Alexa, and other smart home platforms.
The electronics giant has followed through on its promise to open the APIs for its ThinQ appliances, and Homey, which is owned by LG, is one of the first platforms to implement it.
The LG ThinQ app for Homey is available now for both cloud-based and hub-based setups and lets you add connected LG washers, dryers, TVs, and more to Homey and control them directly or with automations.
CES saw wild innovations from Roborock and Dreame and helpful upgrades from the rest of the pack, all of which are set to make 2025 a banner year for those who’d rather leave the cleaning to the robots.
ThirdReality’s MK1 Magic Keyboard ($80, launching March) is a Matter smart button. Ingenious!
The function keys are programmable buttons. Just press to activate a scene or control smart devices like lights through Apple Home, SmartThings, or Home Assistant. Mechanical keyboard / smart home nerds rejoice!
So, of course, I had to go try it out. This $150 LED Light Therapy Face Mask is the smart lighting company’s first lighting-focused wellness product, and it sounds like there may be more to come. I think it’s rather fetching ... don’t you?
This cute little guy is all over LG’s CES booth, winking at people and offering them popcorn.
The LG On-Device AI Hub (great name) is a smart speaker with a 4-inch screen, built-in camera, and microphone. Designed to be a satellite to the ThinQ ON home hub, LG says it’s a concept product, so there’s no price or release date.
Lockly’s latest smart lock, the Vision Prestige, shows your visitor through a built-in camera. It’s a neat concept, but bending down to see who’s at the front door feels a tad awkward.
The video was also quite dark, and the screen was tiny, but it showed the visitor instantly — not always the case when pulling up a feed from a video doorbell on your smartphone.
For the ultimate in multitasking, this “Indoor Garden” from LG is a grow light, accent light, and a speaker all in one.
It’s still a concept product, but it can auto water your garden while it grows and also play it some tunes from the 120 watt, 4.1 channel sound system.
