This roundup is part of This Year in Gear, a look back at the year’s most notable releases. To stay on top of all the latest product news, subscribe to our daily Dispatch newsletter.
The Awair Element is a new indoor air quality monitor that looks like a retro radio.It has five different air quality sensors, allowing it to measure things like temperature, humidity, carbon dioxide, volatile organic compounds (VOCs) and other microscopic particulate matter (PM2.5).
Not only will this be the most-impressive plug you’ve ever owned, but it’s also likely to be the prettiest. It has an aluminum frame and a black matte body, and it recently won a 2019 Red Dot Award for product design.
The iDevices Instinct ($100) is a smart light switch with Alexa built-in. You can manually switch on/off the light by pressing the button, or you can speak directly to “Alexa” and turn the light on/off. No need to have an actual Echo or Echo Dot speaker within shouting distance.
iRobot, makers of the Roomba robo-vacuums and the Braava robo-mops, combined the two. The new S-Series vacuum adds more suction, a corner-hugging design and the robo-vacuum industry’s first-ever anti-allergen system.
Buying into the Philips’s smart lighting system once meant purchasing bulbs and an almost-$50 hub, but its bulbs now work all by themselves via Bluetooth.
Phyn makes one of the least sexy smart gadgets in the smart home market. It’s also one of the most useful. The Phyn Smart Water Assistant is the most affordable and most convenient smart water monitoring system you can buy.
The Smart Remote U is a new smart remote that’s substantially more affordable than the Sevenhugs’s original-and-newly-renamed Smart Remote X. Both smart remotes look similar, boasting that sleek, all-touchscreen design that Sevenhugs has become known for.
The Wyze Sense costs $20 and consists of two contact sensors (for doors or windows), a motion sensor and the Wyze Bridge, a device that plugs into the back of one of your Wyze security cameras (either a WyzeCam or a Wyze Cam Pan).