Smartlock Experience Leaves NPD's Hold Disappointed in That Connected Home Experience
The challenges the smart home market faces as it moves from the protected environment of the manufacturer's beta test bed to the harsh realities of the mainstream market were highlighted in a recent blog post by NPD connected technology analyst…
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Eddie Hold. Hold, who lives in a 1910 home in suburban Nyack, New York, described his experience testing a Bluetooth-controlled smart lock as part of an effort to live with connected technology. Hold installed the do-it-yourself lock and found it wasn’t up to the rigorous real-world test lab of a 12-degree New York day. The “frigid weather was too much for the lock to handle,” he said speculating that the cold sapped the lock's battery life or the motor inside had frozen. Hold turned to his smartphone for a fix, but “it’s not that smart and couldn’t help me out,” he said. The smartphone was supposed to automatically initiate a command for the lock to open as he came within Bluetooth range of the lock, he said in a phone interview. A backup option on the phone app can initiate a manual command by pressing an unlock button, he said. Neither option worked. The lock "was trying but it wasn’t really doing anything,” Hold said. He could hear the motor trying to engage the lock, “so it wasn’t a Bluetooth issue,” he said, saying the "brand-new batteries” likely didn’t have enough juice to move the motor due to the cold weather. Aesthetics will challenge connected technology across the board whether it’s wearables or home automation, said Hold. “It has to bridge that gap between elegance and technology,” he said. It’s one thing to build a smart product that’s functional “but it has to look right for the house just as a wearable has to be something you’d be prepared to wear,” he said. For Hold, his door lock experience underscored that it’s “still early days for the connected home,” he told us. Connected home technology is “an interesting concept, but it has a long way to go before it hits the mainstream market,” he said. Most consumers who had Hold’s experience would likely have been turned off to home automation for a long time after, he said. “It pushes you back a couple of years before you’ll try it again.” The technology market has a history of stutter starts where things don’t always go smoothly out of the gate, Hold said. “That’s OK for the early adopter who goes in with eyes wide open, but for the mass market, don’t tell me my lock is not going to work when I need to get in," he said. "That’s not a beta test that’s going to get better,” he said. “That’s just an epic fail.”