HomeTech.fm - Episode 355 - A Slow News Weeks

Episode Date: June 25, 2021

This week on HomeTech: We're in the middle of the slow summer news cycle and managed to pluck out a few headlines about Sonos and IKEA, Ring, and SpaceX having worldwide coverage coming up in September. All of this and a little bit more on this week's podcast.

This is the Home Tech Podcast for Friday, June 25th from Sarasota, Florida. I'm Seth Johnson, and welcome to the Home Tech Podcast, a podcast all about home automation, home technology. This week I've got a, well, let's see, it's been last week, this week, last week, yeah, last week I got sick kind of at the beginning of the week one of those summer sinus infections I guess I don't know I was down for a day I didn't really have a voice enough to do a show right so I just like you know what we'll punt on this week there was only one news story all week that was worth talking about uh so it really wasn't that big of a deal but um I was like, oh, I'll just pick it up next week.

There'll be more to talk about. There's really not much more to talk about this week. It's kind of wild. We are in the summer doldrums of technology news. And I just don't, it's kind of hard to like pull stuff out. So, but we're going to give it a shot. Got a couple of home tech headlines tonight to go over. But first, I want to remind everybody that don't forget about our Home Tech Talks.

We're having a lot of fun over there, meeting every week. Sometime around, I think it's 3 p.m. on Thursdays, we just hop on a big Zoom conference and chat about all sorts of stuff. Today was cool tools, I guess is the best way I could say it. We showed off some fun tools that, that we like to use, uh, in the field and, or when we're doing work around the house, that kind of thing. Uh, Greg actually had a really cool, like vacuum cleaner thing that surrounds your drill bit when you're drilling holes in the wall and kind of sucks up all that dust and drywall dust and kind of collects it right in and of itself. And it was kind of like one of those like as seen on TV products,

but actually pretty cool. I kind of liked it. Haven't ever seen anything like that, but, you know, definitely want to check it out one of these days. But like I said, we've got a couple of Home Tech deadlines, so let's jump right in. Well, last week, IKEA officially unveiled the new Symfonesc Picture Frame Wi-Fi speaker, which also serves as a piece of art that, quote,

seamlessly blends into the home. The picture, quotes around that. The Picture Frame is the third product created in collaboration with Sonos since the two companies introduced the bookshelf and lamp speaker in 2019. The new speaker will come in black, our white version, with interchangeable fronts to offer a variety of looks. So you can swap out the, I guess they would call the canvas, but really it's just a speaker reel if you look at this. The frame speakers can be mounted both horizontally and vertically and have a cable management system built into the back of the frame to help hide the extra cabling. Up to two speaker frames. I thought this was interesting. I opened the manual up and looked

at it, but it looks like you can connect up to two speaker frames, basically powered off the same outlet with the purchase of an additional intermediate connection cord. It's sold separately. And, you know, kind of looks like what you would expect. It has like the male plugs on one end and like the figure eight style plugs on one end and the female on the other. And you just would, I guess, run the wire. Oh, man, horizontally across the wall to the second speaker. And then of course you have one wire going down from the primary speaker down to the outlet. All right, whatever, whatever floats your boat. This speaker is reported to be going on sale July 15th for approximately 179 Euro, 179 pounds

and $199 in Europe, the UK and, respectively, with availability in further regions at a later date. So I don't know. This one looks, it looks like an interesting product. It looks okay, but I'm not, I'm just not 100% sure with this. I imagine with the larger like cavity that they have it is slim like it looks like it can fit against the wall and look like a tv uh look well maybe like a tv like it's not flat like a picture frame at all it's it's gonna stick out a little bit it's gonna you know you're gonna be able to see behind it but uh it's interesting piece and it is a speaker um I noticed that you, there is a variety of mounting options available to you. If you just don't want to hang it on the wall and have the cord going down the wall, you can set it like on a bookshelf, but they still recommend like hanging it in the,

in the top. So it doesn't like fall forward and, you know, fall off the bookshelf or whatever. So yeah, interesting product. We'll have to see how well it does. Uh, kind of goes along in line with, uh, with the, uh, the, the bookshelf and the lamp. And, uh, I don't know, I, I do kind of want to pick up one of these products. One of these days, the bookshelf is the most appealing one to me, but I know it doesn't sound great. The lamp is still expensive. I wish it was a little bit cheaper. And this one, I don't know, this one does this, this one appeals to me about as much as the bookshelf does. Uh, but I don't know if I'm going to pay $200 for it. It really is cool to see Sonos kind of step out of the Sonos products and start using, uh, like this, this kind of product in, uh, this kind of stuff in, in, in building, building the Sonos experience into other products. So that is, that is actually pretty cool. Up next, we, uh, no, my notes are

all gone. Great. Oh, we'll just wing it. So, uh, we, we've got an interesting, uh, interesting look maybe at what is a ring car camera. thanks to Steve Moser over at the Tape Drive, along with a bunch of other products that could be coming out anytime soon for both the home and the car. First up, we're going to talk about the Ring car camera. It's codenamed Jaws, which features what appears to be a camera that's designed to be mounted on a car's dashboard. So Dave Zatz was actually able to track down the support note, which mentions that the power cable off this camera can be kind of tucked away out of sight and that the power will be drawn from the car's ODP, ODPB, sorry, ODB 2 port.

It's hard to say this late at night. At this time, unsure if that's going to piggyback off the ring car alarm which was kind of already mentioned before like in earlier in the year uh that was going to plug in to the same port uh but unsure if it's going to like piggyback off that or be its own unique piece of hardware it would make a lot of sense if you had you know the ring car alarm and then you had a camera attached to that alarm. I don't know. It could be kind of cool. There's a bunch of talk about if this was going to have built-in LTE so you could have additional features like uploading a video while you're on the road and that kind of thing.

Or if it will just be like a standalone product when you get home, maybe the product will upload the video when you get close to Wi-Fi, or maybe even it could maybe even do it over your phone. Although they mentioned Bluetooth, Bluetooth probably wouldn't be a good method to transfer video. It would take forever. So just maybe wait till you get home to upload that video on Wi-Fi. Next up, they have a couple of other cool products I want to talk about. They had some tracking tags, which were previously kind of marketed as Amazon Fetch tags. Fetch kind of being like you could attach these to your pet, and you'd be able to track them down if they get lost. Now it looks like the product will be, will take on the Ring branding and be called Ring Fetch. Like I said, they were going to marketing towards attaching to your pet, but

probably are going to extend that product line now into, you know, other types of, you know, putting on luggage and backpacks and other things around the house, kind of to compete against Apple's new AirTags and Tile trackers. But I would assume this is using the Amazon Sidewalk network that Ring is rolling out as well. So this kind of makes a lot of sense to kind of like bring all these devices together and put them under one roof. If all of your, basically Ring Sidewalk is,

or sorry, Amazon Sidewalk is going to be powered through those Ring devices that we talked about a couple of weeks ago. So it'll be interesting to see what happens there. The Tape Drive article also talks about a couple of other rumored Ring-branded products. The Ring-branded Glassbreak sensor, a mysterious blue box codenamed Quint, and a light version of their gate controller. And finally mentions that Amazon is preparing to ship the always home camera in the next few weeks, which I thought was particularly interesting because that's the ring drone that we've all been, you know, kind of waiting for to come out and see

how that works, see how much it's priced and, you know, fly it around our house, I suppose. It'd be interesting to see how big that thing is when it finally does ship. But hopefully we'll see that soon. It didn't come out, this was Prime Day this week. We didn't see anything come out for Ring on Prime Day, so hopefully we'll see it come up in the next couple weeks and this article is correct. Speaking of Ring, a couple of weeks back,

I think back in April actually,, a couple of weeks back, I think back in April, actually, so a couple of months back, we talked about Ring, or ADT suing Ring over a lawsuit against, basically, Ring was using a, what he called, a striking similarity between the Ring's outdoor siren and ADT's blue octagon signs. According to ADT's press release statement from a Ring spokesperson, Ring will stop selling the current design of the outdoor siren and release a new version. So again, ADT filed this lawsuit back in April and asked Judge for both cash and a halt on sales. Neither company said whether there was any monetary amount that was exchanged, only that they are, quote, pleased to have reached a mutually agreeable resolution.

Typically, that's how lawsuits work. You file these lawsuits, all the lawyers get to talking, and things get mediated out before they have to go in front of a judge or anything like that. So good on these two companies for kind of figuring out what to do. Currently in the U.S., the outdoor siren, if you go to it, leads to a 404 page, meaning it's been taken away. And the product's still available over in the U.K. So if you're shopping over there, you can still find it there. And on to the last story here we got for the week.

According to Reuters, SpaceX President Wynne Shotwell revealed at a web conference that the company's Starlink satellite internet service will be able to offer continuous global coverage once all 1,800 satellites reach their operational orbit. The Aerospace Corporation expects that to happen as soon as September of this year. So worldwide coverage in September. Those 1,800 satellites are just a fraction of the 12,000 that regulators have already approved, but it evidently is enough to enable worldwide coverage. Now, that doesn't mean that SpaceX is going to be able to flip the switch for everyone in September. They'll still have to secure regulatory approval to provide those services in pretty much every country where it wants to offer Starlink internet. So at the moment, it's only available as a beta service in a handful of countries like

the US, UK, and Canada. But CNBC discovered earlier this year that the company's already registered subsidiaries in Austria, Australia, Argentina, Brazil, France, Chile, Colombia, Germany, Greece, Ireland, Italy, Mexico, the Netherlands, New Zealand, the Philippines, South Africa, and Spain. So pretty much everywhere. It looks like northern and southern hemispheres. And as of February, SpaceX reported in an FCC filing that the service already has over 10,000 users as part of the public beta rollout. I know I've been kind of seeing people,

I think right now we're seeing people like in higher, I guess, let's see, longitudes. So up north in Canada, Netherlands, that kind of thing, we're seeing them get the first go at this. And I think as these other satellites come into play and get turned on and tested and all that, we're going to see some of the lower southern, more southern longitudes, I guess, activated.

I signed up for this. I'm kind of thinking I may need to go unsign myself up for this because I really don't need it. I thought the service would be faster initially, like they were talking about gigabit speeds. But right now it looks like it's probably like one, I think it was 100 or something down and 20 or 30 up. Still great. If all you have access to is like brought, you know, like DSL and that kind of thing. But really, not not anything I need here right now. So I may, I just need to take myself off the list and get the I think it was $100 deposit or something like that back. And, you know, maybe one day they'll be able to offer a faster service or the pressure will come and Comcast will up their game a little bit

and finally get us gigabit internet speeds here. It'd be nice. Really, I don't need the download. I want the upload to match. And for whatever reason, I think it's technology. The Comcast can't offer anything faster than I think what they're offering me now, which is like 20 up. So it would be nice to have faster uplink speeds. I really, really wish I could do that. I kind of, I don't know, like the symmetrical speeds.

It seems like it's a lot faster to say all the links and topics discussed tonight can be found in our show notes over at hometech.fm slash 355. Don't forget you can join us in the chat room live starting usually on Wednesdays, a little bit late tonight on Thursdays, but usually on Wednesdays starting from 7 to 7.30 p.m. Eastern. You can find out how to do that more

over at hometech.fm slash live. And no pick of the week, no mailbag this week. I just wanted to get a show out and get it out literally at theometech.fm slash live. And no pick of the week, no mailbag this week. I just wanted to get a show out and get it out literally at the last minute. It's about 11.22 on a Friday, which means I've got a couple of minutes to edit this down and get it published to the website, which should be kind of fun.

Maybe just stick it up as is. Didn't have too many pauses. Anyway, like I said, it's a slow news week and slow news weeks, as I think is the title of the show this week. There's not too much going on. But if you do have any feedback, questions, comments, picks of the week, great ideas for the show, give me a shout. Email address is feedback at hometech.fm or you can go to hometech.fm slash feedback and fill out on that online form. Do want to give a big thank you to everyone who supports the show, but especially those who are able to financially support the show through the Patreon page. If you don't know about the Patreon

page, head on over to hometech.fm slash support to learn how you can support Hometech for as little as a dollar a month. Any pledge over five bucks gets you a big shout out on the show, but every single pledge gets you an invite to the private Slack chat, the hub, where you and everyone else can sit around and talk about, well, today on our home tech talk, we talked about Tesla a lot, which was quite fun, but cool tools in Tesla, I guess, is what our topics were there. But yeah, we talk about just about everything and get to see what Greg's up to because he posted some pictures from work today from a takeover that he's doing kind of cool.

And if you want to help out the show, but can't support financially, totally understand, but I appreciate a doing a five-star review or something fun on iTunes or a positive rating in the podcast app of your choice to help people find the show. And with that, we'll wrap up this week and hopefully we'll have some more news next week.

Maybe we'll have a more news next week. Maybe we'll have a new ring drone thing flying around that we can play around with. Who knows? Who knows what's going to happen? I do know not much has happened over the past two weeks. But maybe we'll try and put something together a little bit more, a little bit different if news doesn't pick up. I've got a couple of actually products to review. Lutron sent me some stuff that I do want to check out, but I haven't had time to recently. I've been kind of involved

with some community efforts and this, that, and the other, and being sick. So spare time is at a premium right now, but hopefully I'll be able to get on that and get something up and maybe talk about it a little bit on the show next week, maybe. I don't know. We'll take a look. We'll see what happens. That wraps up a week in home tech news. Everybody, have a great weekend. See you later.