GE Lighting, a Savant company, today expands its smart home lineup with a smart thermostat, a temperature sensor, a suite of security cameras and a crate of new lighting products. The company also teases it’s got a lot more home-smartification gadgets in the pipeline, all tied together with the Cync app.
After the company’s lightbulb moment of selling off its GE Lighting division to Savant back in 2020, the increasingly confusingly named GE Lighting (a Savant company) is continuing its innovation spree at CES in Las Vegas, with a slew of new product announcements in the smart home space, under its brand Cync, which used to be called C by GE. The naming alone is making me wonder how many names a product/company needs, and whether a “keep it simple” memo got lost somewhere in the steam pipes underneath the company’s headquarters. Luckily the product lineup is less confusing than its nomenclature, and the new set of products reinforces GE Lighting’s determination to take on the Philips Hue and Nest ecosystems of the world.
“The ‘smartest’ smart home consists of a network of reliable products that work together seamlessly and are easy to install and use, for the ultimate in convenience, comfort and security,” said GE Lighting’s VP of Experiences, Paul Williams. “Our new products give consumers the ability to bolster their Cync smart home with new whole-home capabilities that are hubless and can all be controlled by a single app or voice.”
The new Cync smart thermostat comes with all the features you’d expect from a smart thermostat, but adds a few nice touches, too. Unlike certain other leading thermostats (I’m looking at you, Nest), it can be installed without a common wire, which means it can easily be used to make older apartments with pretty much any type of thermostat leverage the power of smart home tech. The thermostat product will start shipping now-ish, and will cost $120 or so.
The thermostat can be paired with the company’s $30 Room Temperature Sensor to keep an eye on individual rooms, too. For people with central air, that might be an opportunity to finally get the vents opened the right amount; for example, if your bedroom always runs 4 degrees warmer than every other room in the house, adjusting the forced-air vents accordingly might help resolve that problem. Whether you need an actual smart temperature sensor to figure that out is a question for another day, but at least now you have the option.
Cync launched an outdoor camera a little while back, and today announces a couple of additions to that lineup as well, with a wired or battery/solar-powered option for the Cync Outdoor Smart Camera. Packing 2K/1280P high-definition video feeds and night vision, and a “digital swivel head” (i.e. the option to change the crop of your video), at least on paper the cameras seem like a pretty solid choice. The cameras also have options for increased privacy and security, with cloud and local SD card storage options available. The wired version costs $100, the battery-powered version is $120, and for an additional $45 you can add on a solar panel to keep those eyes a-peepin.
The bright sparks in the GE lighting labs have been busy little bees, with a flurry of new products to spruce up the lighting design options for your pad. At CES, the company adds 11 new products, including smart decorative filament-style bulbs in various shapes and sizes, such as candelabra and globe, and an additional lineup of “general purpose bulbs” that took like, er, light bulbs. The new lineup of bright ideas is offered in both white and full-color options. The lights come equipped with Wi-Fi — of course, they wouldn’t be very smart otherwise — unlocking a range of features, including voice control, scheduling, scenes and more — all controlled from the Cync app.
Cync’s app is, of course, controllable by Amazon’s Alexa, Google Home and Apple’s Home Kit.
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