All the smart home news, reviews, and gadgets you need to know about

Amazon’s Prime Big Deal Days is well into its second day, and as was the case yesterday, it remains an excellent time to pick up good deals on great smart home gear. We scoured through deals on video doorbells, robot vacuums, smart lights, smart speakers, and more to gather up some of the best bargains that caught our eye. Check out a full list of all the deals in our main post, and read on for smart home deals. Just know the sale runs through the end of today, October 9th.

Update, October 9th: Adjusted pricing and added several new deals, including those for the Ring Stick Up Cam Battery and Eero Max 7 router.

Ring’s new Smart Video Search lets you search through recorded footage to find everything from a lost cat to a red sweater. According to Ring, the AI-powered feature can locate specific events in your Ring video history based on natural language searches, such as “a black cat at night,” “a red truck in the rain,” and “a kid riding a bike yesterday.” Compared to Ring’s current smart notifications, which can alert you to doorbell rings, people, or packages, Smart Video Search opens up a whole new level of historical insight.

The feature is launching today in beta for users in the US with the Ring Protect Pro plan ($19.99 a month). At launch, Ring says it can search for queries related to animals, vehicles, packages, and people, which can be qualified by location, time, and weather — for example, “raccoons in the backyard last night.” It can also identify various actions, including jumping, running, playing, and riding.

Today’s robot vacuums are becoming a bit like cars: with all the features, upgrades, and fancy trimmings available these days, it’s easy to forget that they can just be simple machines that get us from point A to point B. Yes, some bots blow hot air on their bums (mop pads) and deftly navigate dog poop, but there are plenty of basic budget robot vacuums that just do a decent job of cleaning your floor autonomously — as long as you tidy up first.

While higher-priced, higher-powered robot vacuums clean better, budget bots do a perfectly good job, especially if you run them regularly. The biggest downside of cheaper models is they get stuck on cables, socks, shoelaces, and other paraphernalia you leave lying around. If you’re home and can untangle it, great, but if you’re not, then it will just sit there stuck until its battery dies, and you have to charge it up again before it will clean your floors. 

A smart lock is an easy solution to some common problems. Locked yourself out? Need to let a friend in to water the plants? Your latchkey kid lost their key? Hands are full, and it’s raining cats and dogs? A smart lock solves all of these problems and more. 

One of the best smart home upgrades you can make, a smart lock gives you remote control over access to your house from anywhere, plus easy, key-free ways to unlock and lock your door. Smart locks also remember everything that happened, so they can tell you when and sometimes who unlocked your door.

At some point next year, Samsung users should be getting access to the same convenience iPhone users have had for years: the ability to tap their phone or watch on a smart door lock to unlock it. No more messing with keys or unlocking your phone and opening an app; your phone becomes your key.

This week, Samsung announced it’s adopting the new Aliro smart lock standard for Samsung Wallet’s Digital Home Key. This will enable tap-to-unlock and hands-free unlocking for any compatible door locks.

Smart home security company Ring announced today that it’s bringing 24/7 continuous video recording (CVR) to its smart security cameras. This will allow a camera to record continuously rather than just when it detects motion, which is how Ring’s cameras and video doorbells currently operate. 

The new 24/7 recording capability is part of a revamp of the Amazon-owned company’s subscription plan, Ring Protect, which is being renamed Ring Home. It will require the highest tier, Ring Home Premium — previously Ring Protect Pro.

Sleep Number’s newest smart bed is designed to keep you cool at night. The ClimateCool smart bed, starting at $5,499, is the latest product from the company famous for its adjustable mattress firmness. In a press release, the company says the new mattress can keep your body at the optimal temperature with its “scientifically backed” cooling programs that could be of particular interest to people dealing with symptoms of menopause.

This is Sleep Number’s second smart bed that offers individual temperature control on either side of the bed. The Climate360, which launched in 2020, similarly actively draws heat away from your body to help you stay cool, but unlike the ClimateCool, it can also warm you up if you’re too chilly at night.

Explaining the benefits of the smart home isn’t always easy — it’s more of an “if you know, you know” deal. But that “aha” moment — when someone finally gets what’s so great about home automation — often comes when they see it in action. At least, that’s the theory Samsung is testing with its new partnership with Ashley Furniture.

The electronics giant has teamed up with North America’s No. 1 furniture retailer to debut a new in-store experience that pairs furniture with smart connected devices controlled by Samsung’s SmartThings, the company’s smart home platform.

Glass front doors are great for letting light in during the day but not so great when you want privacy at night. The Home Depot has a smart solution for this problem — a glass front door that can switch from clear to opaque on a schedule, with a voice command, or by pressing a button.

The smart glass Feather River door is a prehung fiberglass front door with built-in smart glass. A button on the door lets you change the glass from clear to opaque, and it works with The Home Depot’s Hubspace smart home app to control it from your phone. You can also set the glass on a schedule and have it be clear during the day and opaque at night. The door costs $798 for a quarter lite, $899 for a half lite, and $998 for a full lite or three-quarter lite, which is similar pricing to a non-smart front door.

The newest security camera from Eufy — Anker’s smart home company — can see clearly in the dark, uses radar motion sensing for fewer false alerts, and records 24/7 when wired. As with other Eufy cams, the new S3 Pro has free facial recognition, package, vehicle, and pet detection, and locally stored recorded video with no monthly fees.

Unlike most other Eufy cameras, the S3 Pro will work with Apple Home and is compatible with Apple’s HomeKit Secure Video service.

Arlo is upgrading its security cameras and video doorbells with additional AI capabilities. The company is adding the ability for its cameras to recognize people and vehicles and learn to detect custom objects or changes in the surroundings. While an Arlo camera can currently alert you when it spots a person or vehicle (as well as packages and animals), it can now be trained to tell you exactly who it sees and which vehicle.

The new capabilities are part of Arlo Secure 5, a package of AI-powered features combined with machine learning. Secure 5 is available now to Arlo users in the US, Canada, and Asia-Pacific, with other regions coming soon, according to Ashton Good, senior director of marketing at Arlo.

Google announced today that it’s extending all the software features of its new Google TV Streamer to every Google TV device. This includes its smart home control panel, a new sports page, and new Gemini-powered features.

According to Google, the updates will come to all devices, including Google TVs, Chromecasts with Google TV, and third-party Google TV streamers (like the Onn available at Walmart), in the coming weeks.

It took Google a few years, a couple of pivots, and multiple name changes, but the company has finally built an excellent operating system for watching TV. The Google TV interface — running on top of the Android TV OS (Google’s branding chaos remains undefeated) — has already been doing a really nice job of making it easy to find what you’re looking for and constantly recommending new stuff to watch. But the Chromecast streaming dongle it ran on hasn’t been able to keep up.

Now, Google TV is getting the hardware to match. 

With this week’s release of iOS 18, adding smart home devices to Apple Home just got a lot easier. The update brings direct local control of Matter devices to newer iPhones, meaning all you need to set up and control them is an iPhone that can run iOS 18 — no hub or border router required. This is good news for anyone interested in dabbling in smart home gadgets who isn’t ready to go all in.

Matter is a new standard designed to simplify the smart home. Compatible devices work over Wi-Fi or Thread, a protocol specifically designed for IoT gadgets. With iOS 18, you can now add any Wi-Fi device to Apple Home with just an iPhone. For Thread devices, you’ll need an iPhone with a Thread radio (iPhone 15 Pro or newer).

The latest smart lock from Eufy is its first product to support Matter. The Eufy Smart Lock E30 ($169.99) works over Thread, which should allow for faster responsiveness, longer battery life, and better connectivity than locks that work over Wi-Fi or Bluetooth.

The E30 is also the first smart lock from Anker’s smart home arm that works with Apple Home, although Home Key is not supported. While Eufy offers a handful of older security cameras with HomeKit compatibility, it hasn’t released a new Apple Home product for years.

After years of being on the fringes of home automation, LG is now making a big play in the smart home. It has a shiny new multi-protocol hub, is opening its ThinQ platform to work with more smart home devices, and will soon allow other platforms to integrate its appliances into their ecosystems.

ThinQ’s shift from being solely an app to control LG appliances and electronics to becoming a competitor to smart home platforms like Samsung’s SmartThings and Apple Home has been spurred by the standardization of smart home connectivity through initiatives like Thread and Matter and the rapid development of artificial intelligence.

U-tec has announced a new smart lock that will allow your door to unlock automatically as you approach using ultra wideband (UWB) technology. While U-tec and other lock makers currently have auto-unlock methods that use a combination of BLE, Wi-Fi, and GPS, these can be unreliable and slow. The Ultraloq Bolt Mission UWB Plus NFC is the first smart lock to leverage UWB, which promises a simpler, faster, and more reliable experience.

In addition to UWB, U-tec says the new lock will work over Wi-Fi and Matter and can be unlocked with NFC. At launch, it will be compatible with Android NFC-enabled phones, and U-tec says support for Apple’s Home Key tap-to-open feature will come once it’s available through Matter.

Smart locks may still be a niche product, but lock behemoth Assa Abloy is clearly betting on a digital future for our doors. Despite being sued by the US Department of Justice for trying to buy too many smart lock manufacturers, the Swedish-based company just bought another one: sleek smart lock maker Level Lock.

With this latest purchase, Assa Abloy, which owns a staggering 190 brands in the “access control” space, may now have a significant piece of the puzzle it needs to push the market into a digital future. “Their innovative platform provides an easy transition from mechanical locking to digital access solutions with minimal effort,” said Lucas Boselli, executive vice president of Assa Abloy, in a press release.

Two years after announcing support, Ikea’s Dirigera hub can now be updated to act as a bridge between Ikea’s smart home devices and Matter-enabled systems. The software update builds upon early beta support by letting Ikea’s entire lineup of Zigbee-based smart home devices — like lights, blinds, controllers, air purifiers, and sensors — communicate with Matter-enabled devices from any company. 

Bridging support for existing devices to Matter is a small but significant step in Ikea’s plan to fully support the new smart home protocol. It’s the same tepid approach Philips Hue has taken but hopefully with better results. Other companies like Aqara have more fully embraced the standard by launching native Matter devices that don’t require bridges to do the protocol translation.

After nearly a decade of development, Nanoleaf’s smart switch is finally here. You can preorder the $30 Sense Plus Smart Wireless “Anywhere” Switch today, and it should ship in October. But to get to this point, Nanoleaf had to pivot from its adoption of Thread to create a new proprietary protocol called Litewave.

The battery-powered device brings physical control to Nanoleaf’s smart lighting system, allowing you to press a button to turn lights on or off, dim or brighten them, or change light colors. Plus, built-in motion and light sensors let the Sense Plus Switch adjust lighting based on room conditions.