Gadgetory

hey I'm here in the CNET smart apartment where we've been testing out Sakura Phi's almond 3 smart router specifically how it can help corral your smart home gadgets so this is it right here we've got it plugged in back in our server room and aside from letting us on the Internet it can also keep track of all the other devices that are connected and that includes smart home devices it also has a built in rules engine so that you can automate when they come on and come off based on your location based on the time of day even based on your Wi-Fi presence so I've got my phone here and you can see the Wi-Fi is off when I turn the Wi-Fi on and my phone joins up with the Allman Network you can see this lamp just turns on automatically to text me on the network and says hey it's time to turn the lamp on almond also offers its own proprietary hardware so you've got motion sensors and smart switches and these contact sensors you can stick these on a door and they can detect using magnets when things are open and closed so you see when I close them like this the lamp turns off when I open them like that lamp comes back on so you can set that to turn things on just when you open and close the door now in my tests all of that worked well the rules engine the Wi-Fi detection the extra hardware that you can get it was all very nice and snappy and responsive and easy to use it was just a shame that when we tried to expand the Wi-Fi setup with multiple routers in the home things kind of fell apart it got glitchy and unreliable be sure to check out our full review of the allman 3 smart router for more on its network reliability and overall feature set here in the smart apartment as a smart home controller it's a pretty interesting device you