While not necessarily a travel device, the idea of a deadbolt for home that we can open with our phone, has a lot of possibilities.
No more digging in the bottom of your briefcase for you house keys at 4am after being dropped off by a taxi after a 37 hr door to door trip from Singapore to Chicago. Or forgetting your keys and having to ring your own doorbell at 1am, walking up your irate significant other and the dogs, this waking up half the neighboorhood. Or what if you need to give emergency access to a family member or friend while on the road, you can easily invite them and they can open the door with the August mobile app.
Like all things IOT, the promise is a bit of a ways from reality.
The simple 10 minute install took over 2 hours, but wasn’t really August’s fault as our back door was a little wonky. NOTE: if your door Ian’tva solid door and has a glass panel, buyer beware you may have some install issues.
In our initial tests, the lock worked fine. There was a bit of a delay in opening which was fine for me, but annoyed my fiancée when she had bags of groceries or her hands were full. This seems to be a common complaint, at the August works over Bluetooth to your phone, so the connection takes a moment to make. It seems like the company is trying to rectify this by offered a separate Bluetooth to wifi hub for $49.99 that is said to speed up the unlock process.
Overall the August lock does what is advertised, and it is beautiful. Designed by Yves Behar, the designer of One Laptop Per Child and the Jawbone product line, it is gorgous.
We ended up removing the August lock a month after install, partially because it annoyed my fiancée and partially because we were prepping our home for sale. I plan on trying it once again in the new house, and will likely buy the hub to see if that solves some of our issues. We will update this review once proper testing of the hub happens.
Overall, it’s a first gen IOT device, so there are glitches, and future versions will obviously fix some of the issues, but unless you are an early adopter, like us, we’d wait as the market is being flooded daily with new devices to make your home smarter and to lighten your wallet.
Buy @ Amazon | $249
