Elgato is probably best known for its range of TV receivers for laptops. Well, now it's branched into the Internet of Things and first results are impressive.
Its range of four natty little devices is stylish, low-energy-consuming, since it uses Bluetooth LE rather than Wi-Fi, and doesn't require you to plug a hub into your router for the same reason. I've got a bit of IoT gear and my router is groaning under the strain of all the little mini hubs this involves.
The gear is all HomeKit compatible, and the results from its little army of sensors can be viewed on any Apple iOS device from iPad 3/iPhone 4S/Touch 4 onwards.
First up there's the Eve Door and Window. Stop me if I'm over-explaining here, but this tells you if a door or window is shut or open. Except in our demo it said it was shut when it was open, and vice versa. Hey, let's not split hairs, right? At least it tried. This goes on sale midway through 2015, by which time we're sure it'll know the difference.
The self-explanatory nature of Elgato's product naming continues with Eve Weather, which monitors sports scores for you. No, okay, it tells you the weather. Humidity, temperature and air pressure are all tracked, allowing you to see what's going on outside right now, or view graphs to see how elements have been behaving over the past weeks and months. Interestingly, since HomeKit doesn't allow this, the data is actually stored on device.
Perhaps the most interesting, Eve Room has similar capabilities to Withings Home, tracking air quality - needless to say it was reading "bad" at the Sands Convention Center - as well as temperature and humidity. Air quality measurements aren't just limited to straight-up pollution either - sensors can also tell you "if your carpet smells". Hopefully your house guests haven't been leaving your home for the last few years vowing never to return due to the rug stench.
Finally there's a smart plug, but this seems unlikely to come to the UK or US any time soon. This lets you turn your electrics on and off from the couch or hallway and also tracks energy usage of whatever's plugged into it.
As ever with connected home products, pricing will be key here, but as yet none have been announced. There's a lot of interest in IoT in the home, as Samsung's CEO said in his CES keynote, but people just aren't gonna fall over themselves to spend $20 on a plug socket or 30 bucks on a device to tell them their carpet honks.
Release dates range from mid 2015 for the plug socket and door sensor to "TBC" for the environmental monitors.
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