Gadgetory

hi I'm Andrew Gebhardt for CNET today I'm taking a look at the elgato Eve rule this is an indoor air sensor that's compatible with apple's homekit this guy is bluetooth enabled and battery powered and sends you readings on temperature humidity and air quality if you just painted your home or done some construction alternatively if you're suffering from some allergies this thing should be able to diagnose the problem and let you know hey maybe you need to air this room out a little bit more before you spend some time in it that's pretty cool and eighty dollars actually isn't bad for something that precisely measures volatile organic compounds and this thing was pretty accurate on all three of its criteria and gave us accurate readings that were then graphed and you can view those graphs by the day the hour the week the month it's got a cool there were two times when I was using it when it refused to update on me and there's no way in the app to force a refresh so it can be kind of a pain to be looking at the app and it looks like it's up-to-date but actually you're looking at readings that are a couple of hours behind again that only happened to me twice but it did annoy me both times and it's something to watch out and thanks the homekit you can ask Siri a question like this hey Siri what's the temperature in the living room it's at seventy six point one so the yokatta of room makes it easy to check on the conditions of a room and graph that data over time what it doesn't do is give you any way to use that information you can't set up warning thresholds triggers push notifications so if those volatile organic compounds rise to a dangerous level you have to be in the range of the device with the app open to even know about it it's unable to talk to anything or use the info it gets in any sort of helpful way that actually makes it a part of a larger smart home system in theory this device will improve and gain that functionality as apple's homekit improves but we'll have to wait and see on that to me the whole idea of a smart home is to automate tasks for you and as of yet this thing can't do that so right now again unless you have a specific muse in mind for it I recommend you pass on the elgato Eve room for more be sure to check out my full review on cnet.com for CNET appliances I'm Angie