IFA 2015 is well underway in Berlin, and we’ve already seen a ton of great products being announced. Huawei, Sony, Acer, Lenovo and Motorola have showed us quite a few products yesterday, and it’s now Samsung’s turn. The company has held their IoT press conference at IFA today, and amongst other announcements, Samsung has unveiled a new SmartThings smart home hub. As many of you know, the company already has a ton of IoT devices out in the market, but has now released the next-gen SmartThings smart home hub which connects them all, and it’s compact and sleeker than ever before according to Samsung, though the two very similar in terms of the design.
Samsung has actually teased this announcement back at CES in January, and has now finally launched the SmartThings Hub 2.0. The SmartThings Hubis still basically a square white piece of plastic, but this time around it has a couple of new tricks up its sleeve. The Hub sports Bluetooth 4.0 adapter this time around, along with Wi-Fi, ZigBee and Z-Wave radios. All of this will let you control a wide array of devices around your home. Samsung has also stated that this thing sports a new SoC on the inside, but they did not release any spec info when it comes to that. The SmartThings smart home hub now lets you transmit live video feeds through the SmartThings app, if you have a Samsung or a D-Link video camera connected to it.
That’s it as far as hardware goes, but Samsung has also re-designed the app layout as well. The SmartThings app looks really sleek now, and seems more intuitive at the same time. This app will sport a section called ‘Smart Home Monitor’, which will essentially give you a quick, remote access to all the recorded video clips from your connected camera, and give you the report on other connected devices as well. You’ll be able to ask for this report by simply saying ‘is my home okay?’ to the app. Keep in mind that SmartThings will be free until December 2015, and will then cost $4.99 a month, and it will store your video clips for up to 30 days.
The SmartThings smart home hub is now available for sale on Amazon. Samsung.com and SmartThings.com for $99. The product is also available in the UK for £99 through Curry’s PC World online, and retail stores. As a side note, Samsung has also announced SleepSense along with this home hub during the event, click here if you’d like to know more.
