Honeywell today announced the launch of a new smart thermostat, the first in a family of connected home products. The $279 Lyric features a round shape, a display and smart features for saving energy.
If a round, smart thermostat reminds you of the Nest , I can guarantee you’re not alone, but Honeywell has been in business for 125 years and making round thermostats since 1953. In all likelihood, Nest’s success probably gave Honeywell more of an incentive to invest in smart home products, but it’s hardly fair to call Lyric a clone.
“We invented round. We’re happy to reinvent round,” Tony Uttley, Honeywell’s GM of Home Comfort, said in an interview.
Honeywell has also built a couple of differentiating features to Lyric that will, for better or worse, separate it from its upstart competitor. Nest, for instance, is a “learning” thermostat that tracks your patterns and then tries to adjust based on its predictions. Honeywell, for its part, believes that modern schedules are hardly predictable, so its main intelligence comes through a geo-fencing feature tied to your smartphone.
When you stray outside the virtual fence around your home, Lyric will shut down your cooling or heating until it detects that you’re close to home again. You’ll have a choice for how wide you set the radius of the geo-fence in case you work close to home or spend a lot of time at your neighbor’s house.
Honeywell is also touting a new Fine Tune feature as a unique selling point. Fine Tune draws on humidity, weather data and indoor and outdoor temperatures to tweak temperatures to make sure that the temperature you’re feeling is just right.
Uttley said Honeywell will also add a service component to its Lyric platform. The company has relationships with 90,000 contractors that it can refer for installation or repairs.
At launch, Lyric is available through Honeywell’s professional channels. Lowe’s will sell the device in August, with general availability coming later this year.
FiftyThree’s Pencil stylus will offer greater control with ‘Surface Pressure’ update for iOS 8
FiftyThree’s Pencil , a Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) stylus for the iPad, is about to get even closer to the art and writing tool it’s named after.
When iOS 8 is released this fall, the New York-based startup will roll out a new software feature called Surface Pressure. In short, the width and ‘character’ of your strikes will vary depending on how you’re holding the stylus. So if you press down with just the tip, you’ll see a thin, delicate line on the screen; conversely, holding Pencil flat, or at an acute angle – so more of the tip is touching the display – will produce a thicker, sweeping mark.
The same holds true when you flip FiftyThree’s Pencil over and erase your work. Removing smudges and lines is an art form in itself – plenty of professionals use it to create contrast and bold lines – and Surface Pressure will accomodate that. As you press more of the eraser’s surface on the screen, the Paper app should reflect those strokes and wipe away your lines accordingly.
If you’ve ever sketched with a pencil before, you’ll understand what FiftyThree is aiming for here. Shading and intricate line work are wildly different – as an artist, you need to change the way you hold the pencil, as well as your pressure and even the sharpening of the tip. FiftyThree is trying to replicate that experience and in the process, make Pencil a more viable tool for creatives.
Surface Pressure will be a free software upgrade for Pencil. An exact release date hasn’t been given though – we’ll need to know when iOS 8 lands first. In the meantime, Pencil can be purchased in the US and Canada for $59.95 (Graphite) or $74.95 (Walnut) from Amazon and FiftyThree’s online store.
➤ FiftyThree | Pencil
LG’s new KizON wristband is a wearable for kids that lets parents track their location
LG is going all out to make its presence felt in the wearables space — after its Android Wear-based G Watch went on sale across the world yesterday, it has unveiled today a new wearable device for kids, the KizON wristband.
KizON is designed primarily for parents to track the location of their pre-school and primary school children. By using GPS and Wi-Fi, the wristband is able to provide real-time location information on a smartphone or tablet, so parents can see where their kids are.
The KizON wearable also features a ‘One Step Direct Call’ button, which lets parents contact their children easily. If the kid fails to answer a call from any pre-set phone numbers within 10 seconds, KizON will automatically connect the call so the parent can listen through the built-in microphone. Kids can also dial a pre-configured phone number in case they need to speak to an adult.
Another feature of KizON is ‘Location Reminder’ — which lets adults set the device beforehand to provide location alerts at specific times throughout the day.
KizON is equipped with a 400 mAh battery, which LG says will last 36 hours on a full charge, while parents will be notified via their smartphones when battery life falls below 25 percent.
To attract young children to wear the device, LG says there will be a wide range of accessories featuring popular animation characters for KizON — which will come in three colors: blue, pink and green.
KizOn will make its debut in South Korea tomorrow, and will be rolled out in North America and Europe in the third quarter of this year. The price of the device hasn’t been specified yet, with LG saying that details will be announced locally.
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Images via LG