Hey,
Good Morning and how’s it going? Firstly, Happy New Year!
The smart home news stories were scant last week for obvious reasons 🙂 but did manage to identify a few nuggets for this week’s newsletter. First up is Philips Hue smart lighting products:
Hue Dimmers 💡
2021 will herald a new era of the Hue dimmer switch! The existing form factor has been with us for a number of years and Philips recently announced plans to release a new iteration of the switch in the coming weeks. Here’s the deal with the new switches:
- Apparently, they are going to look more modern. Rounder corners for instance are one of the design features.
- Four buttons become three. In other words, the engineers have combined the functionality of buttons two and three together.
- The top on the button has includes LED, which will be useful in the dark.
- The base plate for the switch is larger to accommodate EU in-wall boxes.
You can check out their blog post here to find out some more and see some pictures.
Outdoor Hues
The engineers in Philips Hue are busy. In addition to new Hue dimmers, there are hints that the company is planning the launch of some new Outdoor lighting products in 2021. I was going to report on the release of a new outdoor lamp but the announcement was pulled recently, so we await further information on this product once Philips is ready to tell the world. While perusing the blog, I found out that they have released a new version of the Appear Outdoor wall lamp. To date, we could only buy the black aluminum version of the lamp, in 2021 the company is going to allow us to buy the stainless steel version. From a personal perspective, we have some dumb outdoor lamps at the back of our extension, might consider purchasing a couple of these at this stage. Take a look here yourself over at the Hue blog.
Chinese Smart Bulbs
Another smart bulb from Yeelight (a sub-brand of Xiaomi) has hit the market this week. It utilizes the Seamless protocol from Google, which basically enables third-party consumers to easily set up up a Smart Home device. So less clunky. Anyway back to the bulb:
- Takes less than a minute to setup.
- Works on Wi-Fi thus no dedicated hub required.
- Supports color and dimming controls.
- And of course, provides support for Google Assitant.
Check out this article over at Droid-Life to read some more about these new smart bulbs.
Other bits of Smart Home News
Wyze releases some new software for their cameras – As reported by Wyze over on Twitter, this update improves local storage stability, fixes a connectivity bug that caused streams to get stuck at step 3/3, and fixes a bug that caused a yellow spot in the video.
Epic Video Blog Post 📹
Posted a gigantic blog post that contains over thirty technology training recorded twenty years ago. Check it out here!
Weekly Smart Home Voice Command! 🎤
Hey Google, cancel my scheduled Actions
Thanks for reading! and Happy New Year, Gerard
P.S. For those who feel the choice of smart home systems and solutions out there can be overwhelming, then why not consider taking part in the Smart Home in 8 Weeks Course in 2021