Smart Home Software Coming Together through Wink Hub Tech
A smart home isn’t really all that smart if your thermostat doesn’t talk to your theater, or your security system isn’t somehow working in concert with the smartlock. On their own, devices from different companies intended to improve at-home life are both intuitive and beneficial, but the practicality isn’t always easily visible or properly focused for user ease and comfort.
However, innovations like Wink Hub are aiming to use collaboration by multiple entities and their compatible software to create a new user experience. It can all be possible within a modest budget, too.
Different manufacturers are trying to get the various unique smart products currently on the market to work together through a central hub, and Wink’s $49 price tag makes the prospect of centralizing the compatible software seem more practical than ever before. Gigoam’s hub guide shows options that are as expensive as $299, further pushing a smart home out of the average consumer's reach. What we need is functionality for a bargain price, and that option is starting to appear.
There’s no need to connect the Wink Hub to a router, as the rectangular device accesses the wireless functionality of all the products in your home and works through a handy mobile app. If you have a Nest smoke detector and the wireless, motion-detecting Haiku ceiling fan in your home, you won’t need multiple apps clogging up your phone. It can all be monitored through Wink’s device.
Right now, the smart home feels more like the next big thing rather than an opportunity for here and now. That’s partly due to the price of each piece, as well as the incomplete nature of the current setup. This technology is still fresh and relatively infantile, so we’ve only seen pieces and parts of the home upgraded to a point where we can consider them “smart.”
But one of the other roadblocks we see as we approach smart-home adoption is a lack of interconnectivity. If you were to build the most expensive, advanced smart home with current market components, it would feel like a puzzle with either missing or incompatible pieces. There are too many parts of hardware attached to dissimilar applications, but a cheap device that ties all this software together could be the first step to wider adoption.
Wink Hub isn't the end all-be all answer to smart-device collaboration. But, it looks as if we’re getting closer to bringing different pieces of tech together within a central hub, making this idealized view of a shiny, wireless home seem much closer than ever before.
