Jennifer Pattison Tuohy

Senior Reviewer, Smart Home

There’s a hidden message in Amazon’s event invites

Jennifer Pattison TuohyFeb 5, 2025

Amazon announces February product event

Jennifer Pattison TuohyFeb 5, 2025

I tried the tech that makes hands-free smart locks actually work

Powered by ultra-wideband, the next generation of smart locks will turn your phone into a key — that you never have to use.

Jennifer Pattison TuohyFeb 2, 2025

JetBlue is the first airline to take Venmo payments

Jennifer Pattison TuohyJan 29, 2025

Jennifer Pattison TuohyJan 24, 2025

Matter plans to fix your home Wi-Fi.

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

Jennifer Pattison Tuohy

Jan 23

Jennifer Pattison TuohyJan 24, 2025

Here’s another use for that Thread radio in your iPhone.

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

Jennifer Pattison Tuohy

Jan 23

Jennifer Pattison TuohyJan 24, 2025

mmWave tech is set to take motion sensing to the next level in the smart home.

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.

What is mmWave, and what does it mean for your smart home?

[The Ambient]

Matter will be better in 2025 — say the people who make it

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.

Jennifer Pattison TuohyJan 23, 2025