Jennifer Pattison Tuohy

Senior Reviewer, Smart Home

Tile trackers are being fully integrated into Life360

Jennifer Pattison TuohyMay 29, 2025

Blink’s budget buzzer gets some worthwhile upgrades

Jennifer Pattison TuohyMay 29, 2025

Jennifer Pattison TuohyMay 27, 2025

Homey’s pint-sized smart home hub is now available.

Announced at CES, the $199 Homey Pro Mini can connect to Zigbee, Matter, and Thread devices, along with those from brands like Ikea, Sonos, Lutron, Roomba, Nest, Philips Hue, and Aqara, to run your smart home.

Unlike its bigger sibling, the $400 Homey Pro, it doesn’t support Z-Wave, BLE, or IR, and can handle fewer integrations, but is a good option for a simpler way into more advanced home automation.

Homey launches a $200 smart home hub

Jennifer Pattison Tuohy

Dec 18

Jennifer Pattison TuohyMay 22, 2025

My cat just outsmarted my smart home.

As I was making breakfast this morning, Smokey jumped onto the counter, walked over to the sink, nuzzled his head against the motion sensor in the Moen smart faucet, and proceeded to drink from the flowing water.

I’m so proud! (Now, if I could train him to do the dishes... .)

The smartest cat in the house.

Photo by Jennifer Pattison Tuohy / The Verge

Google’s Home APIs are gaining Gemini intelligence

Jennifer Pattison TuohyMay 22, 2025

Switchbot’s latest lock can unlock with a look

Jennifer Pattison TuohyMay 22, 2025

Jennifer Pattison TuohyMay 21, 2025

Now that’s a really smart fridge, Samsung.

Researchers at Johns Hopkins claim to have developed a solid-state refrigeration tech that could increase efficiency by 70 percent compared to traditional thermoelectric materials.

The thin-film material called “controlled hierarchically engineered superlattice structures” (CHESS for short) is a thermoelectric material that could be used to make super-energy-efficient, super-slim fridges. And they might come from Samsung.

Samsung Research was part of the project, and the electronics giant just launched a new line of fridges with a thermoelectric Peltier module.

Updated May 22nd to clarify the efficiency comparison.

Nano-engineered Thermoelectrics Enable Scalable, Compressor-Free Cooling

[jhuapl.edu]