Gadgetory

hey guys it's joe the android guy now we all know that smartphones and tablets have helped quite a bit to organize our personal lives they hold all of our contacts they hold our emails they hold our calendar it's great it's all right there and it's all with us all the time but what can we do to help automate some other parts of our lives well that's where the Nest Learning Thermostat comes into play using your android-powered device or some other smart phones you can control the heat or the air conditioning in your house let's unbox this and then see how it works this is the Nest Learning Thermostat this is just the surround that goes around a very nice very elegant this is the thermostat itself now the thermostat looks like one of those old-fashioned kinds except if you see here we've got a nice little LCD that's actually a square LCD that's just made to look around for those of you who have asked you've got a ring here that turns that way and that way on the back you've got a little mounting shoe this essentially plugs into the mounting bracket the mounting bracket is where you plug all your wires in my thermostat has four wires they're clearly labeled i plugged them in and everything was fine little mini USB port right there not micro but mini very neat the only you I or only buttons really on this are of course your twist right and left and then push to select other than that that's it the interface is very very smooth very slick once you have those wires put in place and you can see here it's complaining that I don't have this installed on its base so I can't use the thermostat but once I've done that at that point then I have a very nice display that has the temperature not only what the current temperature is but what I've set it to be whether that's higher or lower and if it's actively heating the display will be kind of a bright reddish orange and if it's cooling it'll be a nice cool blue so you know when it's actually doing something when your equipment is on because you may not know if you're Peter air conditioner very quiet you just might not know now inside this we have three different thermometers essentially you know this is a thermostat it's supposed to be very accurate and if one of your thermometers is off because it's got a breeze going across it while you're heating your cooling is going to be off and your comfort level as well so this has three separate independent thermometers in it it's got a proximity sensor which isn't working right now because it's not on the base but it will light up when you approach it if you want it to you can tell it not to you can tell it that you want it to turn on when you click down on it like you just saw me do and then of course it's got a net by the way that proximity sensor works in about a hundred and fifty degree angle so it can sense quite a bit with that it knows when you're home if there's no one walking around this then it figures after a while that well you're not there and it will start shutting things into what's called in a way mode temperatures will get lower in the winter but not so low that your pie it'll freeze it'll get hotter in the summer but not so hot but your pets and plants will die but it's not going to try and conditioned space for us when we're not there so really kind of cool it also has a humidity sensor in there which is very very neat so that's cool just in and of itself being able to utilize this but hey this is pocketnow.com what does this have to do with smartphones well not only is there a website that you can talk to this through Wi-Fi actually through a website this connects to the internet through Wi-Fi you talk to their website but you can also do it from your iOS device or your android-powered smartphone so let's go take a look at that so we've unboxed and we've installed the Nest Learning Thermostat we went through the process to hook it up to the Wi-Fi and now you can see here we are early in the morning quarter seven and it's dark outside my lights are on and it's 68 degrees now if I have multiple thermostats I'd see multiple thermostats across there I've only got the one so let's take a look at it open it right up you can see that my heat is set to 68 degrees this is neither blue nor orange so it's not heating or air conditioning it's just kind of sitting there if I want to raise the temperature a couple degrees I can do that until eventually you know it picks on the the heater which it takes about 30 seconds to do I don't want that to go up so we're just going to bump it back to 68 which is where I like it there you go it kicked the heater on to go ahead and heat the house up now that's great this morning i have this thing cranked all the way down to 50 degrees it remembered that when i get up in the morning I like it set to 68 so it bumped that up and I actually have the house all nice and toasty by about six o'clock this morning I didn't have to set the temperature I didn't have to wait for Twp it just learned it knew what I wanted and it had the house already warm for me when I woke up so this is one view I would like to see a multi-touch twist knob there's just something about that they developed and designed the actual thermostat with a twist knob would be nice if they had multi-touch to be able to adjust the temperature rather than just up and down but that's you I that might come it might not and it's really not that much of a big deal let's go back to the first view if we rotate this on the side at this point now we can get two more thermostats like we had before we can also get to settings and this is how I set this up I hit settings down here and i can i'll add a thermostat that's what I had when when I didn't have a thermostat set up here so now that I do I can set my fan to auto or on okay go back to settings I can rename it I named it nest that was one of them that they named if you've got a thermostat in your hallway can name hallway upstairs you can name it upstairs garage whatever you want so it's really easy to tell them apart and they talk to one another so they work together temperature scale i can set to fahrenheit or centigrade and then technical information that's got some mac addresses and whatnot that you don't need to see on there so we're done with that down here we've got heating versus cooling and of course this is January so we've got it set to heating very very cool very nice does not have a widget so you can't see just what the temperature of your home is at a glance you actually have to launch the app which does take a little bit of time to load and to communicate with our service to get that information but overall very cool now this is going to be the next big thing not nest per se but automation of your home automation of your environment we've already kind of automated our PIM our personal information management like we talked about in the intro this is the next big thing there are going to be a lot of companies trying to jump on this trying to figure out how to do it nest is one of those that's done it right next we have electrical monitoring that still doesn't have a really good solution there's not good hardware and good software their stuff out there it's just not as elegant as nest is and then of course eventually we're going to have lighting control and whatnot that's all nice and elegant now a lot of you are saying hey that already exists there's some security systems that do that yes there are there are even some some do-it-yourself stuff yes there are they're just not elegant they're not really consumer friendly with this net nest thing can't even talk today Nest Learning Thermostat I was able to unbox it and get it installed I don't know 15 minutes at the absolute tops so very easy very quick the solution is elegant my four-year-old son knows how to use this thing it's that intuitive and that's really what it's all about so keep an eye out for stuff like that if you see it really elegant home automation solutions that you'd like us to cover or you'd like your other pocket now readers to know about please leave those down in the comments below of course if you like seeing this kind of control over your life give the video a big thumbs up for pocket now i'm joe levi