wink, another smarthome hub coming

damage said:
with backing from ge, honeywell and phillips, another hub is coming to the market. it will sell for $79 and have support for bluetooth, zigbee, zwave and wifi.  home depot has signed on to sell it. another article from gigaom says they are already for sale in home depot.
 
I'm glad somebody is putting forth some zigbee products.  I hope their offering endures longer than Lowes's dwindling Iris selection.  Still, the over-hype is palpable when it says, "Home Depot now sells 600 smart-home products, six times as many as it did two years ago."  Really?  If so, I sure haven't noticed it.
 
NeverDie said:
I'm glad somebody is putting forth some zigbee products. 
 
This is just a hub for communicating with zigbee products, the products themselves are expected to be made by others.
 
I've not seen a clear explanation of what's going on 'behind the scenes' with the whole Lutron RF product lines.  Serena, Sivoia, RA2, Caseta, Pico remotes, etc.  Just how interoperable is all the stuff?  Or are there 'managment limits' placed on what's essentially all the same hardware?
 
Well you know that will never be clear.  It is doubtful that any RA2 and Caseta/Serena products will ever be cross-compatible.  A subset of Sivoia QS Wireless are compatible with the Caseta ecosystem.  Pico is pretty much universal. 
 
They don't want to cross-contaminate their target markets for HWQS, RA2, and Caseta. 
 
They have limited stock in a lot of stores.  If you buy 2 other compatible products you get the hub for 99c.  However they don't have the $15 bulbs in store yet.
 
Automate said:
Not bad for $50 but I doubt it works without the cloud service.  Anyone know?
 
I'd like to know as well. They are in stock at my local store but I'm not sending anything to their cloud.
 
The reviews on Amazon are not good.  Apparently a lot of the devices that are supposed to be supported are not yet supported.  Hopefully they will add support over time.
 
That's the cost of being an early adopter.  On one hand, of course it's exciting to see so much interest and development in an area that many of us have been enthusiasts of for a while - but with SO many options coming out and so many not going anywhere, you either have to be willing to throw some money away trying to keep up and experiment, or just sit on the sidelines while using the tried and true solutions until some great new standard and leading products emerge... then wait for thos to get acquired by some big guys and finally turn into something stable and reliable.
 
You could also just purchase it with two devices that you can re purpose with another controller and get the Wink hub for free. 
 
I read somewhere that it doesn't matter what two Wink devices you purchase to get the 100% Wink off deal.
 
This way you can test the Wink for nothing. (well in a round about way)
 
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