Smart Homes

cross-posted from: https://radiation.party/post/133703

[ sourced from The Verge ]

In the decade or so since the two companies launched overpowered thermostats that held so much promise for the smart home, they have gone down drastically different paths. Where Ecobee’s original product has matured into a fine vintage, Google (which bought Nest in 2014) has let the excellent Nest Learning Thermostat wither on the vine, ostensibly replacing it with a watered-down version with half the smarts and none of the visual appeal.

By contrast, Ecobee’s latest flagship thermostat, the Ecobee Smart Thermostat Premium, has a slew of new capabilities. In addition to being a very good smart thermostat that adapts your heating and cooling based on whether you’re home or away and even which room you are in, it is also a smart speaker (Alexa or Siri), an indoor air quality monitor, a smoke and CO alarm listener, a temperature and humidity sensor, and a radar-powered motion sensor. While Nest was the first to add radar-powered motion sensing to its thermostat, the other notable recent hardware upgrade was… a mirrored face.

The Ecobee Smart Doorbell Camera is a wired video doorbell that costs $159.99. Image: Ecobee The new Ecobee Smart Doorbell Camera, launching today for $159.99, has a headline-worthy trick of displaying a live feed from the camera onto your thermostat (not just the top-of-the-line model, but the Ecobee Enhanced and Ecobee with Voice Control models, too). This is something I always thought Nest might do. Instead, they have stand-alone smart displays for viewing your doorbell feed, but those haven’t been refreshed in a while.

Ecobee also announced today that all its thermostats going back to the Ecobee 3 will act as a keypad for Ecobee’s smart home security system, and those with speakers can also be a siren. Nest’s security system has been discontinued, and its doorbells don’t talk to its thermostats.