Nest Protect review: a smoke detector for the smartphone generation

Back in 2011, Nest did the impossible: It made thermostats sexy. Apple veterans Tony Fadell and Matt Rogers applied their iPod-designing expertise to the largely utilitarian world of home-climate control, creating the Learning Thermostat, an appliance aimed squarely at the gadget-obsessed citizens of the smartphone age. And then, earlier this year, Fadell and Rogers took on another traditionally banal (but utterly important) aspect of home life: the smoke detector. The conceit of the Nest Protect was to bring some of the same aesthetics and smart features that made the company’s first product a success.

The result is a smoke/carbon monoxide detector with mobile device connectivity and a range of expressions that go far beyond the old beeping alarms, as well as a unique gesture feature that lets you silence the device with the wave of a hand. Admittedly bummed at the inability to test the Learning Thermostat in my prewar New York City apartment building, I happily jumped at the opportunity to review the Protect. So Nest sent along two devices, a can of something called a “smoke detector tester” and, thankfully, thorough instructions on how one goes about testing smoke detectors without accidentally burning the house down.

Hardware

Given Nest’s origins, it’s not especially surprising that the company managed to make even the product’s box a thing to behold. The message is pretty clear: If Apple ever saw fit to produce a smoke detector, it would look something like this. It’s a well-designed bit of packaging that looks more suited for a Best Buy vending machine than a dusty hardware store shelf. Inside, you’ll find a wall mount, a set of four screws embedded directly into the cardboard packaging and an awful lot of paperwork — after all, making sure the device works properly could be a matter of life or death. As for the Protect itself, you’ve got two options, both at the same price point: a battery-operated model, and a wired version for those who want to tap into their home circuitry. Seeing as how I won’t be using the detector permanently, I opted for the latter, which comes with six AA Energizer Lithiums pre-installed.

Like most current smartphones, the Protect comes in either black or white. Nest sent me two white devices, thankfully — far better for blending in on my apartment walls. Perhaps some of you willing to drop $129 on this sort of product want to make the thing as conspicuous as possible, but personally, I’d prefer not to have to discuss my smoke detector with everyone who visits my apartment (that’s what record collections, bookshelves and stuffed grizzlies are for). With that in mind, it’s not surprising that the Protect has a much subtler aesthetic than the company’s first device, though it’s still unquestionably a much nicer object than the vast majority of smoke detectors I’ve encountered.

The Apple connection is pretty clear here, right out of the box. With the clean lines and rounded corners, a quick look at the Protect’s profile invites comparisons to a flattened Mac mini or Apple TV. The front of the device, meanwhile, is almost all grille — this is, after all, a product designed to wake you from deep sleep a couple of rooms away. A big, circular button sporting a Nest logo sits in the middle of the dotted plastic face. Mobile devices aside, this button will be your primary method for interacting with the Protect. You’ll press it several times during setup, any time you want to test the detector and when you want to quiet the alarm.

There’s a thin circle in the button, with faint, light gray text so befuddled houseguests know they’re looking at a smoke and carbon monoxide detector. In this spot, you’ll also see the light that emanates from behind the button, forming a glowing ring in the center of the smoke detector. This is how the Protect manages to communicate without always making noise. Nest opted not to include a display, likely because you won’t find yourself physically interacting with a smoke detector nearly as often as a thermostat. The vast majority of the time, there’s no light on at all, allowing it to blend in with its surroundings and conserve battery life.

Still, the light is pretty expressive. During the setup process and testing, it turns blue, letting you know it’s working and connected. When you turn off the lights at night, it glows green for a moment to let you know everything is all right with the sensors and batteries (if there’s an issue, it’ll turn yellow and tell you what the matter is when you wave your hand in front of it). And if you so choose during the setup process, the pathlight will light up when it detects motion in the dark, a sort of beacon to help you navigate your way through a pitch-black room. The light turns yellow as an early warning sign of a problem and red when it’s time to sound the alarm.

On the back of the Protect, you’ll find detailed explanations about each of the light colors and the standard warnings that come with a product like this. There’s a micro-USB port in the middle for “internal use only,” according to Nest, and holes for attaching it to the wall dock, a process that just requires a simple twist. At the bottom are two screws you’ll need to take out to remove the back while changing the batteries. When you first take the Protect out of the box, you’ll also spot a light blue tag popping out the back — this ensures that the batteries aren’t in before you’re ready for them. You’ll need to yank that out to get started.

Setup

Pull out the tab and press the button and the Protect will say, “Hi.” The smoke detector has a soft-spoken, feminine voice, the sort of strangely calming robotic presence you’d like guiding you in a time of emergency. The voice follows the greeting by asking you to choose whether you’d like her to speak in Spanish or English. Next up, you’ll be prompted to test the Protect, to make sure things are all right. “The alarm will sound,” she explains. “The alarm is loud.” She ain’t lying. It’s grating, ear-piercing and strikingly loud, and you’ll hear a total of six beeps as the Protect checks the smoke and then carbon monoxide sensors. It’s annoying when you’re testing the thing, sure, but when it comes to smoke alarms, loud is good. “The test is finished,” she adds, calm as ever. And, if all goes according to plan, “everything is okay.”

Now it’s time to download the app. Ahead of Protect’s release, the company issued an app that monitors both its thermostats and smoke detectors, available for iOS and Android. Create an account through Nest’s site (if you don’t already have one); use your handset to scan the QR code on the Protect’s back (or manually enter a key, if you’re so inclined); and the app will take you through a simple process of connecting it to your wireless network. If you’ve ever connected anything like a Chromecast to your home WiFi, this should be a familiar process, though I did have to repeat it a few times as everything attempted to connect. I spoke to a Nest rep, and the company’s not sure what happened there, but the problem resolved itself before I had to pull my hair our hair out. When you’re done, the voice will tell you that she’s “connected to the internet” and everything’s ready to go. If you’ve got a second Protect, you’ll be prompted to connect that, as well. It’s a similar process, albeit slightly shorter with some redundant steps removed.

Next, it’s time to take the old smoke detector off the wall — though the company suggested I not actually do that in my testing, as the review units weren’t quite final. This part of the process is naturally a bit more involved, should you opt for the wired version. According to the included instructions, the ceiling is the best place your Protect — or, failing that, high up on a wall. In either case, it’s best to avoid obscuring any edge of the detector with a tight corner. Once you’ve found the right spot, screw the backplate into the wall and snap the Protect in place.

Testing

And now the fun(?) part. If the beeping during setup didn’t set off the neighbors, I assumed the testing would. No one came knocking, however, which should give you some idea of how much you can count on the people in your building in case of emergency. Good thing I have four smoke detectors in my apartment at the moment. Nest equipped me with the Smoke Sabre, a smoke-detector tester in an aerosol can. With a spritz (or with actual smoke or carbon monoxide, naturally), the ring of light will turn yellow, alerting you that something is up. The Protect gives you a window of a few seconds in yellow, dimming slightly when it spots you, letting you know that you’re in the sweet spot and can reset the alarm with a wave — just as you might wave away the smoke when overcooking something on the stove. The idea is to stop false alarms before they start — so if you’re in the kitchen and something starts smoking, you don’t have to deal with emergency alerts during a non-emergency.

I had a bit of trouble getting the gesture-based override to work during the trial, in spite of some frantic waving. I contacted Nest about the issue, and a rep told me that, due to federal regulations, there are two versions of the alarm. The less serious of the two can be overridden by the user. The other just goes straight to alarm. Apparently I’ve been hitting the old Smoke Sabre a little too hard. The upside, however, is that I got to see the Nest spring into action (the downside, naturally, is that I got to hear it, too). This, it turns out, is why you installed that app — like the smoke detector itself, it will sit around idly for the majority of the time, a subtle reminder that everything is copacetic.

When the Protect encounters an issue, however, you’ll get a push notification on your mobile device (an optional, but highly recommended feature). The normally green ring in the center of the app will turn red, along with a quick indicator of what’s wrong (in this case: “Smoke”). Tap on that and you’ll get a breakdown of your alarms’ statuses — e.g., “Smoke” for the dining room and “All Clear” for the kitchen. Tap through to notes and the app gives you a full breakdown of what happened — at 4:47 PM: “There is smoke. The alarm is sounding.” I was eventually able to hush the sound by hitting the button, and the timeline mentions that as well. At the top of the page is a “What to Do” note, including the usual stop, drop and roll instructions (which you hopefully don’t need to pick up a smartphone to remember). There’s also a big red button at the bottom for dialing 911.

Wrap up

I’ll admit it’s been a while since I’ve been in the market for a smoke detector. A cursory scan of Amazon, however, indicates an average price between $10 and $30, with combo smoke/carbon monoxide detectors landing at the higher end of that spectrum. In either case, it’s a range the $129 Protect misses by a country mile. Of course, this isn’t just any smoke detector. Like the Learning Thermostat before it, it’s a bit of home electronics aimed at gadget nerds, and certainly Nest has managed to do a lot in an otherwise staid category.

It’s a lovely object, so far as these things go, and its expressive center lighting and voice directions offer a lot more than the standard series of beeps: alerting you to emergencies, low batteries and even lighting your way at night. The gesture-based hush can save your eardrums and the smartphone alerts may well save some lives. For most, however, standard smoke detectors will likely still do the trick. Even though certain device idiosyncrasies can be a hassle, $129 still feels like a lot to pay, given the industry average. And for those living in larger homes, it’s a price that’ll add up fast.

Filed under: Household

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Deltaprintr: a quick, tall 3D printer for under $700 (video)

The trio behind the Deltaprintr launched their project with a noble enough goal: creating a 3D printer that was cheap enough so as to actually be affordable for college students like themselves. The result comes in $685, preassembled. Not too shabby, so far as these things go. And with the project currently about halfway through its Kickstarter campaign, the online 3D printing community has clearly taken a bit of a shine to what the team is attempting to do — in fact, it took roughly a week for them to top $100,000 out of a $195,000 goal. They haven’t been able to maintain that clip, but with around $130,000 and 15 days left, things are looking pretty solid for the Brooklyn-based crew.

So, aside from price, what makes this thing different? For starters, there’s an easy calibration process for the print heads — which, as anyone who’s spent any time with a consumer device can tell you, isn’t always the case. In fact, you can set the machine to auto-calibrate. The printer’s also quicker than many of the units we’ve seen and is capable of some high-resolution prints, with the default set at 100 microns (you can get even higher res, but that’ll take longer, naturally). The platform is also reasonably modular. Thanks to the fact that the peripheral uses fishing line instead of belts, you can actually double the height for around $15 in additional parts, if you don’t mind tinkering. And the printer works with PLA plastic, so there’s no need for a heated bed (though, if you’re doing a quick print, you might want to stick some tape down for traction).

Having sold out of the more inexpensive kits, the base price for an unassembled version on Kickstarter is currently $600. You can find that link below. The above, it should be noted, is still a prototype, so you can expect, you know, fewer exposed wires in the final.

Filed under: Peripherals

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Source: Kickstarter

YotaPhone review: LCD on the front, E Ink on the back, unique all over

We’ve long pondered the possibility of an e-ink phone. One that offers enough battery life to get us to the end of the day, or maybe even the End of Days, simply by being less reliant on the power-draining frivolity of an LCD or AMOLED panel. What we didn’t envision, though, was that the first mass-produced attempt at such an idea would come from a Russian company we’d never heard of, or that it would take the particularly unusual form of the YotaPhone — a device that does many things differently, not least in having a curved E Ink panel on its rear side. As you’re about to see, a lot of these two-faced ideas have potential, but some of them need some work — a lot of work, in fact — before they’re ready for prime time.

And then there’s the price tag, which may come as something of a surprise in its own right given the YotaPhone’s mid-range specs. It costs €499 in Europe, which equates to around $675 in the US (although the handset isn’t currently available there). That means you could actually buy the Yota’s two halves separately for a more affordable sum; for example, by getting a Nexus 5 and a Kindle. Nevertheless, the ability to buy the two-in-one YotaPhone is something we didn’t have a year ago, and something that isn’t offered by any other company, and so it’s worth bearing that in mind as we proceed to lay out its many flaws.

Hardware

Design and build quality

You can probably tell from the gallery above that this is a fat cuboid of a phone. It stands out for its blockiness and wide bezels, which contribute to a maximum thickness of 9.9mm (0.39 inch) and a weight of 146 grams. In terms of volume and weight, the YotaPhone is only around 15 percent bigger than the HTC One mini, which has the same 4.3-inch screen size, but it feels slightly bigger in the hand because the thickness barely tapers at the edges.

The one exception to all this rectangular-ity is to be found at the top-rear edge, which is thinner than the rest of the phone thanks to Yota Device’s most visible design flourish: a slight inward curve on the Gorilla Glass of its E Ink panel. This little detail is subtle, but people do seem to notice it — usually around the same time that they realize they’re looking at a dual-display phone. As a result, the YotaPhone’s appearance is a great conversation-starter.

Now, chatting with strangers is nice and all, but it’s not really a reason to buy a piece of technology. Personally, we’d be a lot more ready to forgive the YotaPhone’s utilitarian appearance if its hardware lived up to that promise, but it doesn’t — at least not in the sample we were sent for review. The wraparound plastic band that holds the two panels together has the potential to be durable, especially since it doesn’t need to make any allowance for a microSD or swappable battery, but there are visible gaps between this band and the E Ink display. The issue is worst at the top of the phone, perhaps as a knock-on effect from the curvature, to the point where you can actually see the SIM tray mechanism lurking behind the seam. Yota Devices tells us that it has fixed this issue, but we can only judge what we have in front of us. We’ll update this section when we receive an absolutely final handset, hopefully in the next few days.

Displays

For a phone that puts such a big emphasis on reading, we’d expect both displays to live up to the highest standards, but they don’t quite meet that mark. The 4.3-inch 720p LCD panel, made by Japan Display, is a lot better than some we’ve seen and it certainly feels like current technology, but its viewing angles and black levels are a touch worse than what you’d get from a bigger manufacturer like Samsung, HTC or Apple.

Things deteriorate slightly when you get to the E Ink panel on the rear. Although the contrast and 640 x 360 resolution are up to snuff, the panel occasionally suffers from severe ghosting from the previous image, such that it can look messy — although this is more of an issue with wallpapers and other images, rather than clean text.

It’s also worth pointing out that there’s no technology here that couldn’t have been found on e-readers many years ago: no color, no video-friendly refresh rates and no glow-lighting. Neither is there touch sensitivity on this panel. This omission may have been inevitable from a manufacturing point of view, but it may determine the entire fate of this product, as it leads to all kinds of software limitations, which we’ll get to in a moment.

As a way of dealing with the lack of touch, the folks of Yota have added a capacitive area beneath the panel, which can respond to swipes, taps and holds — gestures that mostly work OK, but which can sometimes by unresponsive. The same gestures work on an equivalent touch-sensitive area on the front face of the phone, beneath the LCD, but we eventually decided to turn on the stock Android on-screen navigation buttons instead, because, again, these swipe gestures weren’t always easy to get right.

Camera

Don’t be alarmed if you boot up the camera app only to be confronted by a black screen. It’s just your hand blocking the lens — a lens that is placed at the bottom of the phone instead of where you’d normally find it, at the top. This may have been an inevitable consequence of the E Ink panel, which is too tall to leave space for the camera module above it, but the end result is awkward. The camera lens gets smeared more often because it’s so close to where all the swiping happens, and the border around the lens makes it hard to clean without a proper lens brush.

The camera’s position also means you have to turn the phone upside down every time you want to take a photo, and wait for the gyroscope and OS to catch up with the new orientation before you press the shutter button. Alternatively, you have to grip the phone by the edges, using just your fingertips, which doesn’t always feel quite right either.

If you can get past this early awkwardness, however, you’ll quickly come to like the stock Android camera app, which — like the rest of YotaPhone’s operating system — has been left largely unaltered. It’s full of speedy little shortcuts, like switching between the camera and the gallery by swiping to the left or right; and tapping and holding anywhere on the screen not only to set focus and exposure but also to bring up a radial menu for quick access to settings. The only onscreen camera buttons you need to worry about are the shutter release and a mode button to quickly switch between still photography, video and panorama. It all takes a bit of getting used to, if you’re new to stock Android, but it’s uncluttered and intelligent.

The YotaPhone’s 13-megapixel image output is of decent quality for an off-the-shelf camera module, which is a polite way of saying there’s little to report in terms of either flaws or bonuses. JPEG compression isn’t too harsh, leaving around 3.8MB of data in an average still, and the multi-exposure HDR mode usually provides images with minimal blur from handshake. Video quality is equally competent, with fast and sensible automatic adjustments, and with gentle enough compression to cope with detail and motion. The only weakness there is with the audio, which occasionally pops and also has excessive noise reduction that can make voices sound tinny. Lastly, the front-facing camera is passable, but too low-res and too highly compressed to use for anything but video chat — output images are 1,280 x 720 and tend to be less than 200KB in size.

Software

It’s in the software department that the YotaPhone comes alive. This is also where it dies on its feet. The predicament is simple: There’s enough pre-installed software on this phone to demonstrate that the second E Ink screen has real potential, but there’s not nearly enough support for this display to make it useful right now.

Back when the YotaPhone was still in the prototype stage, we pressed its creators over the need to somehow support Kindle and other e-reading apps. We were told that this support would come, by means of a workaround that would allow the user to trigger page-turns using swipe gestures, regardless of whether Amazon’s Kindle app ever officially supported the YotaPhone’s E Ink panel. This idea hasn’t made it through to this build, and that’s a huge limitation.

As it stands, the only way to read e-books on the YotaPhone’s E Ink screen is by means of Yota’s pre-installed app, Bookmate, which seems to only offer a handful of out-of-copyright items in English. There’s a subscription model that might help users in Russia to access a wider and more recent range of content, but it’s not available in the UK. As a result, the phone is currently useless for e-book reading — at least until someone can find a workaround to trigger those page-turns as Yota Devices originally envisaged.

In any case, let’s take a step back and look at how you actually get information onto the rear screen.

The first method is by mirroring the LCD to the E Ink, by means of a two-finger swipe downwards on the LCD side. This is mirroring of the dumbest sort — you’re effectively just creating a screen grab and then displaying the JPEG on the rear panel. This might have a few uses — if you need to keep a boarding pass or some detailed info up on the screen for a while — but those situations are rare.

The second method of sharing displays is much smarter. Apps that have been built or customized for the YotaPhone have a button in the top-right corner of the screen that triggers some function on the rear panel — and instead of just a static image, this function can be dynamic and interactive. Equally, the YotaPhone’s customized version of Android 4.2 is able to send some notifications across automatically. The best way to illustrate this is by going through the three main pre-installed apps and functions that will be of use to an English-speaking audience.

Notifications

When you get an email, text, weather alert or any other notification, the YotaPhone gives the usual audio alert and displays a summary of the notification on the rear panel. You then swipe to remove these notifications one by one.

Depending on your chosen privacy settings, you can decide how detailed a notification summary is. It can just be the number of alerts of a certain type that are awaiting your attention, or it can include sender details and the first line of content. You can also choose to treat notifications differently depending on who the sender is, by adding certain contacts to a list of people whose notifications are treated as private and kept off the permanent rear display.

Calendar and Notes

You need to think carefully about the issue of privacy, because people do notice what’s written on the back of your phone — and because the phone is so different, they often can’t help but stare. This applies to notifications, but it’s perhaps even more important with the “Organizer” app, especially if you have colleague’s appointments shown in your Google calendar.

If you can get around the privacy issue, either by keeping the phone in your pocket or just not caring about what people see on the back, then you might find it incredibly important to have an always-on agenda displayed on your phone. And this agenda is up-to-date, too: If someone adds an appointment to your calendar, it’ll show up on the E Ink panel automatically after a short delay.

The Organizer app is okay, and it offers basic control over which calendars to follow, but it can’t compete with calendar apps favored by power users. For example, there’s little ability to display to-do lists or notes alongside appointments — they can only be shown separately, by means of a Notes app, which should really have been integrated into Organizer. This is the problem with Yota’s reliance on customized apps — they’ll just never be up to the level of what’s available in the Google Play Store.

Maps

The YotaPhone comes with a pre-installed mapping app called MapsWithMe, which offers country-specific map downloads and seems to be relatively reliable — at least for the small part of London geography that we tested it with. You can set pins, and home in on your position, and then hit the “Flip” button to send the map to the always-on display. From there, you can use swipe gestures to zoom in or out of the map. Unfortunately, the rate at which your position refreshes is way too slow for driving, but it’s handy enough at a walking speed.

Social networks and RSS

This app can be configured to send tweets, Facebook updates and RSS feeds to your rear display. Strangely, these notifications don’t auto-update; you have to swipe to unlock the screen and then swipe again or hit the volume rocker to see the latest messages. Another limitation is that you can’t show different types of messages at the same time. This is no match for HTC’s BlinkFeed, for example, which displays tweets alongside Facebook updates and everything else. In fact, it’s hard to see how this could be called a “hub” at all.

Performance and battery life

We encountered a few bugs with our review unit. It crashed on occasion, for no obvious reason, and had to be restarted. Sometimes the lock screen was unresponsive until the display was switched off and then on again. But on the other hand, the phone’s cellular functions, WiFi, GPS and compass all seem to be reliable. The phone’s bands aren’t suited to the US, but there’s healthy support for 3G and LTE in the UK and Europe, including the key 800MHz, 1,800MHz and 2,600MHz LTE bands. On Vodafone’s LTE network in London, we had no trouble getting beyond 10 Mbps down and up with a couple bars of reception, and the phone was good at holding onto a weak LTE signal.

In terms of the main processor, we’re looking at the Snapdragon S4 Pro of yesteryear. Yota Devices originally said that the YotaPhone would come with a current-gen SoC, so we’re slightly disappointed not to get a Snapdragon 600 or even 800 in the final build. The S4 Pro’s performance isn’t bad by any stretch, with app load times and general navigation fluidity that is noticeably better than Snapdragion 400 phones like the HTC One mini, and not too far off Snapdragon 600 handsets like the Galaxy S 4 and HTC One. In fact, in terms of gaming performance as measured by 3D Mark, the YotaPhone was able to marginally beat the more recent HTC One Max, with 6987 points. Then again, a true flagship like the Sony Xperia Z1 trounces the whole lot, while also revealing that other big issue with the YotaPhone’s older processor: poor power efficiency.

With the latest chips, we’re used to seeing more than nine hours in our standard battery rundown test, rising to 12 or more hours on some flagship phones. The YotaPhone barely survived seven hours in the same test, on HSPA+ rather than LTE, and its real-world stamina was even worse. On a day with extremely light use, we’d barely make it to 11PM with any battery left. Notching up the usage slightly, by throwing in music playback over headphones, Netflix and other activities, and we struggled to make it until 8PM. It’s hard to forgive this when we’re reviewing a handset that is being sold on the basis of longer battery life.

Wrap-up

This is an unhappy conclusion to reach, given all the technical challenges that Yota Devices has overcome in the past couple of years. But it’s unavoidable: The YotaPhone isn’t yet ready to deliver on its dual-screen promise due to various issues ranging from poor build quality to short battery life and, most importantly, an inability to make use of its rear E Ink panel except in a very limited selection of pre-installed apps. Without support for our favorite e-book and magazine platforms, or for Spotify and other streaming apps, or transport updates and Google Now (which we’re told is coming soon), there just isn’t much reason for us to flip the phone over.

What’s needed is a big push on the software front. Not just in terms of stimulating third-party app developers to take the YotaPhone seriously, but also by reducing the phone’s reliance on those developers in the first place. This might happen through better mirroring of the LCD onto the E Ink side, rather than the stagnant screengrab-mirroring we have now, alongside some kind of mapping from swipe gestures to standard navigation functions (forwards, backwards, play, pause, et cetera).

This lack of support could potentially be solved within this generation of the product, through some major software updates, but we wouldn’t rush out to buy the YotaPhone unless and until that happens. The other option is to wait for a complete hardware revision, in the hope that it’ll bring a full touch-sensitive E Ink panel or some other solution. Either way, with all the expertise Yota Devices has gained in putting this type of display into a phone, there’s a much better chance that this type of hybrid handset will one day be successful.

Filed under: Cellphones, Mobile

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