10 Smart Home Products Tested (From $13 to $2,500)

Wow, is this that's fast man. Today I have 10 new smart home products ranging from a $13 add-on to a $2,500 beast. I've run them all through the ringer and I'm going to show you exactly where they win, where they fall short, and who they're actually for. Some of these are incredible, some not so much, but by the end one of them is taken to automate your life pick of the month. Let's give her. This is the Ecovacs Goat A3000 LiDAR Pro. It's the newest robot mower from a brand traditionally known for robot vacuums, and it's a beast. This series of mowers runs between $2,000 to $2,500 US, but it's built to handle up to three quarters of an acre. It cuts up to 400 square meters per hour, driven by a 13-inch dual blade disc cutting system and a 32-volt power system delivering up to 400 watts of cutting power. Visually it's impressive, and last year's smaller model only had a single blade disc and lacked the new side trimmer. When you combine that new trimmer with a dual LiDAR system and an AI-capable camera, this is packed with enough tech that it should be perfect. What you get is almost as important as what you don't get. You don't get an annoying tower to stick in your yard. I've dealt with those on most other mowers, and this one operates entirely off Wi-Fi and Bluetooth, and the setup is as easy as installing a smart bulb. Plug it in, set a pin code so no one can steal it, and grab the app. From there it uses automated map creation, and I mapped five complex zones in about an hour, and the accuracy was nearly perfect. You get four operating modes, manual, auto, trimming, and area, plus full scheduling. The app gives you a lot of great control and settings. You can even set different cutting heights and speeds for different zones. Over time it actually improves its own maps too. It did get stuck in our yard once and then marked the spot on the map, and it hasn't had an issue there since. The object recognition is near perfect, and I've intentionally stepped in front of it. It just reroutes and continues. And my favorite part, well, when the goat is trimming, it's extra careful. If someone comes near it, it stops, but it keeps moving, and actually it warns people to stay back. Now, overall, you're barely going to hear this thing ever running until that trimmer kicks in. Then it does get fairly loud. For our reality check with the goat, we set up the gauntlet. Now, I dropped unexpected objects right in its path all over the yard. What you have to know about this system is that its recognition won't always work on objects that are smaller than 10 centimeters. Everything else, it'll pretty much reroute around. Okay, let me see. I'm gonna get tougher now. All right, buddy. Oh, that's an improvement over last year. That's a big improvement. And then I thought I would test what happens when we move it in the middle of a job. The thing's actually not that heavy, at least not as heavy as you would think with a mower of this size. Over here. Yeah, so we went from about there to there. Said continue. Let's see. Oh, he's going back. Oh, he figured out exactly where he is. Even without the RTK tower that you gotta put around with all these, he knows where he is in the yard. I have to give you a little story here, okay? This was overgrown when we did the mapping. So it's never been cut. We let it. And honestly, it's so we could do this. Okay. Look at this thing. That is awesome. Okay. I never expected a little robot mower to be able to do something like this. But I'm actually going to get through part of this. Look at that. I actually got in there. Oh, you're not going to do this stuff with this mower. But there is a ton that I actually got done here. And it's totally fine. I was able to deal with a lot of this. Now, this is what you deal with. And then you redo your boundary. You redo your map. That's how this one works. It becomes a maintenance item, not to deal with this kind of stuff. There are three places the goat flexes hard. Now, first, the simplicity. The automated mapping was fantastic. To be fully up and running in about 90 minutes with complex maps and zones is very impressive. Second, sophistication. You can run it fast when you need a quick trim or slow and meticulous. It alters its own cutting paths to keep your grass healthy. And it lets you dial in the exact cut height for the front yard versus the back. Third, the navigation. You'd think a robot this big would struggle in narrow paths. But a quick settings tweak in the app made it navigate tight walkways perfectly. This is the best mower out there, I think. But it does still have a few catches. First, the edge cases. It dropped into a garden bed a couple of times early on. It did mark those spots and it avoids them now. But you'll have to manually tweak the trimming boundaries in the app to get everything perfect. Second, the smart home integration. Ecovacs doesn't have an incredible breadth of connections here. There's no native matter support and the home assistant integration is currently broken. Brand new issue should be resolved soon. So you end up relying a lot on the Ecovacs app. Although you can, of course, use Google and Amazon. This is the first robot mower I can wholeheartedly get behind. Because it is, first and foremost, an excellent mower. It's a true set and forget device. Once you tweak the digital boundaries, then there's very little that can go wrong here. Maintenance is basically just swapping out the blades every once in a while and maybe buying some new trim line. This is a strong unit and our first buy recommendation of the month. With the caveat that, of course, you're spending a good chunk of change to replace your weekly yard work. One thing that needs to be clear. Ecovacs paid for their spot in this video. But they did not pay for that verdict. That was all me. This is the TAPO DL-130. A new smart lock from TP-Link's smart home brand. It's a $230 product. It works over Wi-Fi and it does palm vein and fingerprint recognition. Plus, it has a keypad and a physical key. You can also use the TAPO app, Google, Amazon and SmartThings to manage your door. And it even has a doorbell built into the lock itself. It features a dual battery system. And despite running on Wi-Fi, TAPO rates it for up to a year on a single charge. Based on about 20 unlocks a day. Even if that's slightly off, that's a long time for a Wi-Fi lock. The DL-130 is BHMA grade 2. Grade 2 isn't the absolute top, okay? Schlag and a few others will sell you a grade 1. But most of the cheap biometric locks you see all over Amazon aren't BHMA rated at all. And that's the comparison that actually matters here. When you install this, you feel it. It's a physically serious lock. Everything you need is in the box. There's also an included door sensor. And that sensor is crucial for this lock because it's how the lock actually knows the door is shut. If you've ever had a smart lock lie and tell you it was locked while the door was standing wide open, that little sensor fixes it. Install and setup are pretty quick. And the only confusing part might be the large plate that goes on your door. But that's there to help with that BHMA grade rating. Setting up the palm vein and the fingerprint unlocking takes just moments. The app is intuitive. The integrations with Amazon, Google, and SmartThings, they work really well. The only hiccup is that Google and Amazon voice control requires you to speak a PIN code out loud to unlock the door. So it ends up being a bit of a conversation instead of a single command. The most impressive thing about this lock is the palm recognition. I've used other palm vein locks and they take way too long to decide if it's you waving at the door. This one is so fast and accurate that you almost don't stop walking. Okay. Wow, that's fast, man. Really impressed. So you see when this little image comes up, that's the palm vein being ready. And you just stick your hand there and you should be able to hear that. I know it's a little noisy, but yeah, it's done instantly. Now, here's a fun test that I made to try and trick this lock's vein and fingerprint recognition. Now, my thumb is a little wet. It's not super soaked or anything, but let's see what happens. See that? And this is going to happen a bunch of times. That's what goes on. Now, on the flip side, my palm is a little wet. I'm going to go soak it. Hang on. So here we go. Okay. I'm even dripping. Let's go. Look at that. Perfect. That's the difference right there. But let's get it dirty and then see if that still works, that palm vein. If this works, I will be surprised. Let's try it out. That didn't work. Cookies were too much. The DL-130 wins in three major categories. First, the speed. You've seen this. Second, local security. Your biometric data never leaves the lock. It's stored and encrypted on the device, never uploaded to the cloud. Third, the backup features. You can pad your pin code with random digits so nobody snags your code. And if you manage to run the battery completely dead, you can use that USB-C port on the bottom to get in. But it falls short in two critical ways for smart home builders. First, no matter. There is no native Apple Home integration. And Homie and Home Assistant have no official support either. That turns this into a device that's far less integrated with the rest of many homes. Second, Wi-Fi over thread. I would have preferred thread since it'll be running on my home network anyway. Without matter and thread, it's an overall miss for deep smart home automation. My verdict is this is for people who want a simple smart lock that reacts instantly. If you just want it to work every single time with yourself as the key, this is the lock. It's for someone who wants a heavy, secure lock with high-powered biometric tech. This is the Amazon Ember 4 series. It is Amazon's own 4K QLED, and the whole pitch is that it doubles as a digital art display when you're not watching anything. I bought the 55-inch, and I paid $430 Canadian. Delivered. Now QLED here is describing the color layer, not the backlight underneath it. It is a direct lit panel with no local dimming and peak brightness around 320 nits. So this is a budget 4K set with a quantum dot layer on top, not a premium one. So hold that thought because it matters for the art part later. With the TV, you also get an Amazon Fire TV remote, the basic stand, and standard wall mounting options. But where it gets interesting is how you can expand. You can accentuate this setup with echo speakers for surround sound, upgrade to premium Fire TV remotes, or add the Fire TV soundbar. Plug it in, log into your Amazon account. Now the Fire TV interface in 2026 isn't quite as customizable as, say, the early 2020s. It's fairly locked down with Prime TV heavily dominating the main page. You do, of course, get all the apps you want, games, and there are some sections that show recommendations from your other apps like Netflix. The most often section, though? Sponsored. Kind of annoying. But the experience with Miss A+, the new AI voice assistant, is something Amazon has heavily focused on. Let's check the speed of the interface and the voice search. What's weird about this is one time it didn't work at all. The second time it worked instantly. And a third time told me the camera wasn't going to come up on screen. And then it did. Other smart home control has been a little up and down. Show me the Chop Shop cam. Okay, showing the Chop Shop cam. What's the temperature in the Chop Shop? The temperature in the Chop Shop is 75.6 degrees Fahrenheit. What's the humidity in the Chop Shop? I don't have humidity data for the Chop Shop. Would you like me to check the temperature there again? Can you unlock the door lock in the Chop Shop? I can't unlock multiple targets with voice code. Please ask me to control each one separately. But the voice assistant is supposed to be best used for finding movies. I want to watch a movie with the lady from Modern Family whose name is Claire. And it was a golfing movie. Searching for that golfing movie with Julia Butters. There it is. Happy Gilmore. That search capability is mostly great. The fact is, it didn't work a few times. And I don't know that I want to deal with Amazon's inability to be reliable. Where this TV wins comes down to three things. First, the price. When you look at the feature set, the 4K panel, all the services it supports out of the box. For the price I paid, this is incredibly tough to beat. Second is simplicity. You just need that Amazon account. And from there you get Prime Video, tons of apps, and an interface that's pretty good. Easy to navigate without ever needing to use a phone app to change settings. And third, the ecosystem. Well, the voice assistant is powerful. The preloaded art looks decent. And being able to instantly pair with Echo speakers to create wireless surround sound, it's a huge bonus. But there are three distinct catches if you're putting this in a smart home. First, the OmniSense feature. The sensors that turn the TV on when you enter the room. They only kind of work. In a living room, maybe that's cool. In a bedroom, it's a freaking nightmare. It turns on constantly at night. And every time you walk in your bedroom, it's lit up. You'll end up disabling it for sure. Second, you know, the panel finish. Because this panel does not have the matte finish of the higher-end models, and because it's built to be bright rather than paper-like, the art still shows up as a glowing TV rather than a framed canvas. Third, smart home speed. Amazon's smart home integrations with the Fire TV are just too slow to be useful. And Mattercasting, which is the big piece for TVs at Matter 1.5, currently seems to only work well with Prime Video. Now, my verdict. Well, for the price, this is one of the best out there. Amazon has simplified their process to the point where anyone can use it. If it's cheap TV time in your house, go get one of these. Enjoy the extra features that work for you, but don't consider this a Prime candidate for a dedicated home theater. You're gonna want to upgrade for that. Quick timeout. In case you hadn't noticed, this is a brand new series for Automate Your Life, and I'm calling it The Showcase. My goal is to make this your monthly smart home ritual. Around the 15th of every month, we'll drop one of these. Tell me if you agree with my verdicts, what you're seeing with these products in your own home, and what you want tested next month. Now, the channel is also evolving. My intuition, and the data, tells me that the traditional 20-minute dedicated tech review is fading in 2026, and we have to shift with the times. So the rest of the Automate Your Life channel will be focused on big comparisons, roundups, and the deep dive tutorials that actually help you build a proper smart home. But for keeping up with what's new, that's what this showcase is for. Quick specs, a reality check, and a hard verdict. And about that last verdict. Some of these are sponsored, and you'll see this on our verdict card when they are. What they're doing is they're buying placement in a specific month's video. It does not buy the verdict, and none of these companies see this video before you do. But let's get back to it. This is the incredible looking Govee Lantern Floor Lamp. It's a 1400 lumen, 1000 to 10,000 Kelvin, RGBICWW smart floor lamp with voice control. It also has touch control, a massive library of scenes, synchronized lighting modes, and DIY build-it-yourself options for effects. It stands 63 inches tall on an 11 inch circular base, with the lantern shade making up the top 11 inches. The base isn't overly heavy, but it's weighted enough that it won't tip if you bump into it. But the magic is in the shade. It's a squishy silicone that diffuses the lighting inside. RGBICWW means the three color LEDs are combined into a single chip, while the warm and cool white LEDs are separated and controlled independently. That distinction matters because those two white LEDs drive the full color temperature range, from a super warm amber 1000 Kelvin, all the way to an intense and icy 10,000 Kelvin. They mix together on the surface of the diffuser with the RGB chips. And when you watch multi-color effects roll across the shade, it's a wild visual experience. It's simple. It can be dressed up or down, and it fits into almost any room. But living with this lamp day to day is where it really shines. When you just need light, the silicone diffuser doesn't ruin its brightness. 1400 lumens genuinely feels like 1400 lumens, but when you're relaxing at night, it can produce a soft halo effect that almost looks like the lamp isn't even on. Now, if you do want to show off, the app features over 100 scenes, and because the lamp has a built-in microphone, it syncs beautifully with music playing in the room without needing a separate sync box. While this connects to your home's Wi-Fi at 2.4 gigahertz, the physical control on the top lets you turn it on and off, and you also have a Bluetooth backup. So if your Wi-Fi is down, you're having problems with that, you do have the phone backup option always available. When you first look at it, you think, OK, this is a hard plastic shell. It's your typical stuff. Nope. And look at, you can see those LEDs. You know, hey, let me get a better shot of that. Looks like a crazy mouth. Now, let's talk about matter and AI. So right here, you can see easy, quick control. You have hundreds of scenes. You know, he's changed whatever you're feeling like. They all look amazing. And you have these deeper features like the speed. How fast do you want the fire effect to go? And it really changes everything. And then you can favorite it. And there's categories. There's tons of categories for all these different effects. So it's incredible, right? Here's the Govee Lantern Floor Light in, you know, Apple HomeKit. Ready? It's green. It's not very bright. It's very bright. Super fast control. This is what matter is, though, in 2026 when it comes to lights. So you're just not getting a ton of control options when you go through matter. It means the Govee app becomes required for all the fun stuff you want to be doing. But when you're in the Govee app, the features are essentially endless. And actually, the effects are endless. So this is AI Lighting Bot 2.0. I've shown this on the channel. And sometimes, you know, these effects look better with different lights from Govee. But in this case, I'll hold the talk. I want an effect for Spider-Man's new movie. It's going to design it. City Night Cool. OK. Well, now, if I don't like it, I can ask for a new one. If I do like it, though, I can save this. So I can apply it. And then I can save this to my DIY effects. OK. And this is how you can create unlimited effects. Because then you can go into DIY and you can use these in Govee's app anytime. And you could change to that effect. So for my verdict, go get this one. And find a place for it. It's fun. It's exciting. And it's going to drive conversations with anyone who walks into your home. The color temperature. The dynamic effects. Turn this into a smart light you'll use every single day. And same as the mower. Govee paid for their spot here. But the verdict is still mine. This is the ZBT-2. And this is the ZWA-2. And these are antennas or radios for home assistant users. The ZWA-2 uses Z-Wave. And this one actually is dual protocol. Now you can use both Zigbee and Thread with it. And there's more to that story, too. Both of them have a really important update. And one of the things I want to do with this video is tell you when something big has changed in the industry. So what's changed here? Well, these used to have to be plugged in directly into your home assistant instance. They had to be wherever your hub was. And that might mean that they couldn't be central. Or that they couldn't help you with your network as much as you had hoped. Because really the big benefit with both of these is that they're very powerful. Especially in the case of the ZWA-2. I've personally seen just how far this can reach. Both of these devices have now become capable of being a repeater. And therefore, they are capable of being placed anywhere in your home. This is far away from my hub. My hub is actually down in the basement of our home. Kind of centralized. But I needed something that got out to our garage out there. Especially for Zigbee. Yeah, there they are right there. Now, why am I talking to you about this today? Well, this can be a big problem for a lot of us. So I'm just showing you the distance out to the back of my home, okay? We have a detached garage. There's one light. There's another light. And Zigbee especially is not going to reach all the way to the end of your property. So for me, these bulbs are relatively unreliable for me. So I fixed that. So today when I look at my Zigbee and Z-Wave maps in Home Assistant, I see all these red bubbles that mean the device is currently disconnected. You can see here my current garage one and two lights are red. The way you can get these two radios to be a repeater is simple. You plug them into a computer. Then you go to the Home Assistant site for the device. And there you'll see options for using them as a repeater or as your main radio. For me, I chose them as a repeater. And then I put them at the edge of my home. And then I added new smart bulbs to test it all out. The first bulb I added was Third Reality's new Zigbee bulb. It connects as a router itself, but routes through the ZBT2. The second and third bulbs I added, these are the ones outdoors. They're eight-year-old Sengled Zigbee bulbs that are notoriously bad. The reason they're usually bad is because they won't often use a repeater to communicate. So if they're too far away from your main radio, you're going to experience disconnections. But actually, they correctly connected to the ZBT2. And actually, they're using the Third Reality bulb in one case as the connection point. But most of this traffic is going through our ZBT2 now. And my LQI and RSSI values for my Zigbee network are really good. So the question as to whether these are worth it. Well, in my opinion, the ZBT2 is going to help a lot of people. Whether you're using it for Zigbee or Thread, it's going to be helpful to get that type of network set up. I think that's a total buy. When it comes to the ZWA2, well, you've got to have a large enough property for this really to matter. And I think the other thing that might catch people is just you got other repeaters around that can get out to the garage with these other repeaters. And if you can do that, you're maybe not going to need the ZWA2. So let's have a quick chat about Z-Wave. There's actually something really impactful going on with Z-Wave. So Z-Wave uses around 900 megahertz as a frequency. It varies a little by country. Someone's trying to buy that part of the spectrum. And I actually don't know who that is. You guys can tell me down in the comments below. But because they're trying to take that basically from open spectrum that anyone can use for any technology and turn it into private spectrum, that would actually be a really big problem for Z-Wave. So there's a bit of an alliance forming right now to kind of have this battle out and try to protect that part of the spectrum. If this is something you want to get involved in, I'll leave a link down below. You can read more about what's going on. The Z-Wave alliance is asking people to kind of help out with this. So I don't know what kind of timelines or what kind of impact this would eventually have. But I think it would be an eventual very big problem if it became privatized spectrum. This is the new Ring Spotlight Cam. It's the second gen of spotlight cameras from Ring. And its big headline upgrade is a bumped up 2K resolution. Oh, wow. Ring has always mastered the out-of-box experience. Setup is completely guided in plain English. And instead of drilling into my home's exterior, I use these cheap vinyl siding clips. Makes the install and setup a five minute job total. Once it's mounted, living with a Ring camera comes down to dialing in battery versus feature trade-offs. The hardware gives you a good 140 degree horizontal by 85 degree vertical field of view, two-way audio and 550 lumen spotlights. It runs on 2.4 gigahertz Wi-Fi version 4. When you pair this pretty good hardware with Ring's ecosystem, including the app and web view, the day-to-day use feels really polished. You get smart single event alerts that combine multiple motion triggers into one clean notification. As a consumer experience, it feels awesome until you look under the hood. It's dusk out, and that's one of the hardest times of the day. So I'm going to do our reality check right now, and I'm going to compare it to another camera I've had on the front of my home for a while now. So got a nice notification. Person is walking on the pathway with a tripod. Incredible, hey? So yeah, that, I mean, that's an amazing notification. What you want, totally. But the tapo did come in sooner with the person detected. The other thing I'm noticing is tapo is reloading quicker. I'll let you guys decide which is the higher quality feed. You know, it's pretty wide angle with the ring here in this case. That's what I'm noticing. What I'll say is tapo is taking more videos more often. What happens when I turn off the internet? So what I'm going to do is restart my network here. Okay, so I just hit restart. I'm going to wait for the Wi-Fi to go out on my phone. 5G, there we go. Okay, let's go out there and see which camera records. If a camera records, I don't even know. I have a notification from tapo. That's pretty wild. That means that's being served inside of the network. So tapo has already done something. The ring camera is not coming on at all. This is the real crux of the issue when it comes to ring in 2026. Fantastic features. Absolutely amazing. It's a great camera. It looks great. It sounds great. The connection is actually really stable. But if your internet connection goes down or you don't pay that subscription, you're not getting any of the wonderful features. You're basically getting a thing sitting on the wall. In 2026, come on. Unplug your router and this camera is a paperweight. If your Wi-Fi signal fluctuates, the camera automatically degrades its own recording bit rate, leaving you with Pac-Man pixelated footage right when you most need it. Without a subscription, you get no video history. You get no videos at all. And none of those incredible AI video descriptions. To get those features, you're pushed into higher tier monthly plans. Want continuous 24-7 recording? Well, that's another paid add-on. The price on the retail box is just the down payment for a bill that never ends. And honestly, those bills seem to get bigger every year now. There's zero local storage. No micro SD card slot. No RTSP. No NAS streaming. Honestly, this is outdated connectivity. Running on 2.4 GHz Wi-Fi 4 means it lacks speed, stability, and bandwidth efficiency of modern Wi-Fi 6 security hardware. So despite the sharp 2K footage and Ring's polished ecosystem, I'm giving the Ring 2K Spotlight Cam a skip verdict. Paying a recurring, growing subscription fee for a camera with no local options is a cost disaster. But this is the relatively new Aqara G350. It's both a camera and a hub. And it comes with these cutesy little bunny ears. It's a 4K camera with 360-degree panning. It even has a 9x hybrid zoom. And it can track people and other stuff. You get a dual lens optical system, a loud 95 decibel built-in siren, Wi-Fi 6 connectivity operating on both 2.4 and 5 GHz bands, a micro SD card slot, and support for local NAS storage and RTSP streams all over your own home network. This is one of the very first official Matter 1.5 cameras on the market. That allows you to bring video feeds natively into platforms like Apple Home, SmartThings, and more. But you're also getting an Aqara Zigbee hub, a Matter over thread border router, a Matter bridge to bring all your Aqara gear into other apps, and my favorite part is the gesture support. When I show you that one, I think you'll get it. There's a lot to talk about when we talk about this experience, because there's so much going on. Now, first of all, the detection options you have without a subscription. You know, motion, people, face, smile, animal, specific sounds, and those gestures. Each one of those has detection settings that help you customize that to work how you want it. The recordings are crisp and clear and night vision is excellent. There's really nothing I can say about the visuals on this camera that I could complain about. The local recording options mean I never have to think about the recordings actually happening. I know they are. Plus, I can pipe this into things like Frigate. I can send 4K resolution footage to hard drives in my home, and I can process them locally with AI here. The two lenses come together in this really interesting way. There's both a normal lens and a telephoto lens. You can zoom in on objects and it actually switches between the lenses automatically. That on top of the tracking capability being pretty good, means this is an excellent security camera for inside your home. There's also a really important feature, the physical shutter. Once that turns on, you get that little face showing you that you have privacy. The hub features are really good too. Although, you aren't able to pair so many Zigbee and Matter Over Thread devices with this, as you can with other standalone Aqara hubs. It's an easy entry point for a budding smart home. But it's the gesture support that gets me the most, because you can start automations that are so easy and it's so effective. And you can even limit those automations to your face. I'm not looking at it, okay? This is important. I'm not looking at the camera and I'm giving it the bunny ears. Now, if I turn around and hang on. So now I'm looking at the camera and I'm going to give it the old bunny ears. Right there, you see that? Ready? Uh, let's give him the gun. Yeah. Now let's do this one. Gotta admit, that one's pretty fun. One of my first tests has to be how far away I can do this. So working still, but watch this. Oh, still got me. Oh my goodness. It's getting good. Still working. Let's back up. Okay. Holy smokes. I'm a long ways away. Still, okay. Maybe not the straightest measure, but 16 feet right there. I've been sitting here for a few minutes trying to get the camera to recognize gestures when I'm sitting here and it hasn't gone so well. So why isn't it as accurate? Well, see that big, nice window behind me that lets in all that lovely light that we all love so much. That's a backlight. So this is being hidden quite a bit by that backlight. And it's hard for me to get the camera to be able to see this. So there it goes. It's just not as reliable. So it will work. It's not as reliable. You gotta play with the location a little bit. I think you want basic backgrounds, things that are not changing so much. You don't want big backlights like that. Kind of calmer situation so that the camera can analyze what it's looking at and respond. I know you can barely see me now, but it's pitch black in here. And we've got three tests to do this evening. The first is just the basics. So yes, right here, I'm sitting on my couch. Totally working. So right here under gesture, I just turned on the face authorization. Now I'm going to go sit down. Yeah, I can still do it in the dark. Unreal. This is my desk. All right. Now the camera doesn't know it's me. So I'm going to hold this up to my face and probably bring down the brightness a little. So it looks a little more natural to the camera. But let's get that in front of my face and let's see. Okay, this is me. Yeah, I've tricked it. So if you have my face, you can run my automation. Please don't steal my face. The Aqara G350 wins in four big ways. Local storage and no subscriptions. At least not ones that you'll need. You get that full 4K continuous recording to microSD or your local NAS. And you've got a lot of AI detection for free. Matter 1.5 and therefore universal ecosystem support. Has a native Matter 1.5 camera and Matterbridge. Streams video feeds. And it also brings other devices into those apps. Number three, the footage is excellent. And it's not just because it's 4K. Actually, a lot of ways that Aqara designs their cameras and their lenses and other components to produce really great footage. They've also got that blazing fast gesture automation option. Using physical hand gestures to start smart home routines. It's faster. It's more reliable than voice commands. But there are two minor catches to keep in mind. It's indoor only. And there's really no mounting options unless you want to 3D print something. It's definitely not an outdoor camera with no weatherproof rating. It does have an okay temperature rating. But I wouldn't be putting it outdoors. It's also locked down in terms of Zigbee. So while it acts as a Matterbridge, it's built-in Zigbee hub only pairs directly with Aqara branded Zigbee sensors. The Aqara G350 costs less than the Ring spotlight cam we just looked at. Yet it gives you 4K footage, a dual lens setup, Wi-Fi 6, local NAS recordings, zero subscriptions as long as you don't need a few things, a physical privacy shutter, and gesture-based automations. So it completely blows traditional cloud-based cameras out of the water. So you want a state-of-the-art indoor camera and a smart home hub? The G350 is an absolute buy. If you want to see more about this camera and that gesture support and what you can do, check out our review video of it, okay? You'll see some pretty wild ways to build automation. Also, you can check out our guide of automation ideas with Aqara's smart home system. They got a lot of unique devices. And so both of those things are going to help you as great resources if you're considering this camera or any of their gear. All right, we need to talk about these. If you've watched the channel at all over the last couple of years, you've seen these. People ask about them constantly. So every month I want to take something a little bit older like this, dig it out, dust it off, and tell you how it went. So that's what we're going to do with the Nanoleaf blocks now. And if there's something you'd like me to dig into that you have in your home, let me know in the comments. Yeah, that's the same effect for two years. I wouldn't even call it an effect. It's just a single color. Now, it wasn't staying that way because I loved that so much. It's good branding. But actually, the reason was it was kind of annoying to change it. It's not that the app is broken or terrible. It's just that, you know, in the last couple of years here, I've maybe opened the app a total of four times or four times when I wasn't troubleshooting an issue. And because I wasn't in there constantly, and I wasn't constantly looking at what I could do with these lights, I kind of assumed that lots of the neat effects that I had found when I first got them were kind of stuck in the app. So actually, as I was preparing to talk about these, and as I was digging into them, I was kind of at the point where I was going to tell you, you know what? Skip this right now. There's better options out there on the market. But I went digging and I found some stuff. Nanoleaf syncs your scenes out, not just the ones that they build or sitting in the app, your custom ones. HomeKit, Homey, and Home Assistant all get access to all the scenes with one of your lights. Although I haven't been able to get those scenes into Homey. I'll come back to that in a minute. I did this for a living and it took me almost two years to find this little feature. And this thing was sitting just behind my head. I know some of you are going to call me crazy, but it was kind of hidden behind this little icon. Honestly, I thought it was decoration in the app. I thought it was a Nanoleaf icon. And when I found this, my whole world changed. It's not a Google. It's not an Amazon. It's not in SmartThings. Almost every other company in the industry builds for those companies, those platforms first with everything they do. Nanoleaf did the exact opposite. And what's wild about that is that these are sitting on shelves in Best Buy and Costco. That is the controller and it has never worked right. It's not always failing like that, but a lot of the time it is. Now, I do have a spare because this setup actually took two separate boxes of Nanoleaf blocks. But installing that means popping some of these off the wall. It's a little bit of a project. So it's still sitting in the box somewhere in here. But if your controller dies or you have this kind of a problem, well, you're kind of stuck. And this is why I haven't been able to get these into Homey as of late to try out all those scenes. Honestly, everything else here has held up, okay? The Wi-Fi on this product initially was a bit flaky. I used to come down and I would find that controller actually sitting there blinking and they would be disconnected from Wi-Fi. The thread was also a bit of a problem. This is a thread border router. And you know what? Since a few firmware updates, both of those things have become excellent. And they are bright and as colorful as they were on day one. And the pegboard attachments, I mean, they're fantastic. I wish a little bit that the pegboard attachments would be usable from other products. They're little square pegboard. But that's why I bought the thing. It had that great pegboard and those options to kind of hang things that I wanted to show you guys. Then a few months ago, Nanoleaf got bought out for $40.5 million by a company called One Robotics. One Robotics is the parent company of SwitchBot who traditionally haven't used thread in their products and don't have their products in any of those retail spaces. Honestly, knowing what these do with those three platforms, HomeKit, Home Assistant, Homey, it makes a lot of sense now, actually. And it makes a lot of sense why the parent company of SwitchBot would wanna go out and get these. So while I was doing the testing here, my verdict switched. They're a buy if you're a user of HomeKit, Homey or Home Assistant. If you're a SmartThings or an Amazon or a Google user, honestly, these aren't worth it anymore, or at least not in my opinion. Quick one, because this has come up twice already in today's video and it's about to come up again. The Matter logo on a box does not tell you that a feature works. That was supposed to be the whole point, but today three separate things have to line up. The hardware has to actually do it. The firmware has to expose it over Matter and then your platform has to decide to show it to you. Any one of those things breaks and you don't get a feature. That's why Govee's effects do not survive the trip into Apple Home. It's why Nanoleaf scenes reach those three platforms and no others. And it is why the next product measures your power consumption every second of every day and most of you will never see it. This is the Ikea Grill Plats and it costs $13. That's not for the plug alone either. That is the kit with the Bill Racer remote included. It is Matter over thread. It has an energy meter built in and Ikea has committed to at least five years of software updates on it for 13 bucks. I've been doing this a long time. I don't think I've ever said a sentence like that. In the box, you get the plug, the remote, and that's it. Batteries are not included, so budget two AAAs in. The remote and the plug are sold as a pre-paired kit and one remote can drive up to 10 plugs, which is a part that a lot of people miss. This is not one plug and one button. This is the cheapest way I know to put physical control on 10 different things in your home. Setup is not setup. You plug in the plug, you put batteries in the remote, and you press a button and it just works. If you wanna add another plug to this same remote, well, you follow a very simple sequence. You plug in the new plug, you hit the pairing button on the remote four times, and then you get the remote within five centimeters of your new plug. And then voila, you have two plugs paired to one remote. And there's no app, no account, no hub, and that matters more than it sounds, right? Because we all know people who refuse to use a smart home app, but pretty much everyone will use a button. If you want your phone involved or you want automations, you will need a Thread Border Router. A Diragera Hub works from Ikea, a HomePod, an Echo Speaker, a Home Assistant ZDT2, whatever you already have. Without one, though, it's a very good dumb remote. Now, here's the thing Ikea advertises on the box and almost nobody actually sees it. Energy monitoring. Over there is the GrillPlats plug, and I'm gonna show you it in a couple of apps. Inside of Apple HomeKit, when I go into the GrillPlats, this is all I can do with it. There's nothing else inside of the settings that I can do with it, really. Inside of Home Assistant, though, okay, it looks like, okay, just a plug. Same thing, except when we head down here, what do we get? Look, energy, power. You can see it jumped right away to 10 watts, and then I have firmware control. I can request a firmware update at some point. I can change the power on behavior. I also get all of these different components of electrical information. These can be very useful for you, and you can see I even have my thread channel and my network and everything all in there. You can see the voltage in here. It's just a huge amount of data. It's a similar situation inside of SmartThings. So here we can see the 10 watts running. We can see the energy meter running over time, so that's watt hours. And something that's really nice, this has just been resolved recently, actually, is that it does show in your energy panel. So you can see it right there, just because I just added it to SmartThings. It's not really showing anything, but there you go. As you build up the kilowatt hours, you're going to have that in the energy panel with SmartThings. And with both of the SmartThings and the Home Assistant platforms, look, you have the power meter and the energy meter that you can base automations off of. And of course, with this, with Home Assistant, you have much more that you can do in terms of triggers and conditions with all those different components of power, right? So you even want to measure something like apparent current. You want to know what type of load is on there. You can do that and you can automate based off of that reactive power too. So that's the same plug, but completely different products depending on which app you opened. And in Home Assistant, where it does work, there's been some back and forth on getting it working quite right. The power monitoring stuff was initially filed under diagnostics rather than sensors. The plug is measuring the whole time. Your app just is determining your experience. And that is not how Matter was supposed to go. Three things are big wins here. The price, obviously. Two devices, 13 bucks, all these features, huge deal. Second is the remote. It works without a hub, without a phone, drives up to 10 plugs. It's a fix for every family member who will not open an app. And third, you don't have to set up anything if you don't want to. So you can hand this to your parents, tell them they have a remote for their lamp or their fan. Two catches though. Energy monitoring, it's going to matter based on your platform. And that Matter over thread means you need a border router for anything beyond the remote slash plug control. Once you have it right in your home, these are honestly amazing. I have a guide linked below for you. My verdict then? Well, it's buy, not if. Just buy and buy a bunch. At 13 bucks, this is the easiest recommendation in the entire episode. Let's crown the automate your life pick of the month. And when I give this away, it's truly an award to a product that epitomizes automating your life. Automating your life means you're not going to spend an arm and a leg and you're not going to spend your life getting it working. And this month, despite all these great complex products that we had, well, the best thing that you all can use is the last thing we talked about. Ikea's nailed it. Giving those products to your parents or to friends that have never used smart home gear, they will be truly overjoyed when you get there. Two lamps packaged together with a remote and rechargeable batteries. You won't even have to connect things to Apple HomeKit or anything else. Friends are going to love it. You can check out all our reviews and guides for all the products you saw in today's video. Those are all down in the description. Now you just watched some of the best smart tech to come out this month, but our mid-year roundup of the very best gear is on screen there now. That's what I've crowned as the top of the industry so far. Some absolutely wild stuff in that video. Otherwise, thanks for joining us on our first episode ever of The Showcase. And of course, live smart.