Gadgetory

when you're building a smart home connected in wall switches can be a great way to smarten up your lights the problem is when you're in a rental space like this the CNET smart apartment then you have to have something with a lighter install enter the smart plug a smart plug can give almost any pluggable device a brain and in the case of this the $50 I home is p8 smart plug that brain means that you can connect that dumb old lamp to Siri Alexa smart things wink and even nest the eye home isn't perfect though I found it set up especially cumbersome pairing the eye home with the Wi-Fi took a couple of tries and more importantly when I wanted to connect the device to the Amazon echo I had to actually download a separate app wink and setup an additional account in order to connect my eye home app to my Alexa app if that sounds like too many steps for what should be a simple pairing it is now once I home is set up it does work pretty seamlessly with home kit and Siri the is p8 even comes with this handy remote control to let you toggle it remotely between the remote and the pretty impressive platform interoperability the eye home is going to work pretty well with gadgets in a lot of people's houses the problem is that broad interoperability doesn't correlate with depth of integration other than what's now pretty standard energy monitoring the eye home doesn't bring very much new to the table the lack of if integration in particular really means that you don't get those same creative and cool triggering scenarios that you can get with say the Belkin Wemo insight switch at the end of the day the eye home is pH smart plug is a reliable device and if you have a particular device that you're wanting to automate with it then it's worth the 50 bucks the problem is it doesn't distinguish itself from the rest of the larger market and I can't recommend it over the industry-leading Belkin Wemo insight switch