The much anticipated 2nd-gen Homey Pro has finally gone on sale, almost ten months after the Dutch smart home specialist first announced it.
We were told back October last year that the multi-skilled smart home hub would begin shipping in December 2022 but it’s not until now that the company is finally accepting orders and shipping globally to Europe, USA, Canada, Australia and Singapore.
The Homey Pro (Early 2023), to give it its full moniker, is – as we mentioned up top – the 2nd-generation Pro model but is actually the 5th iteration of the brand’s smart home hub; the first Homey hub went on sale back in 2016.
Of course, this latest model blows the previous-gen Pro out of the water: 1.5x Zigbee range, 1.5x Z-Wave range, 4x infrared range, 1.2x 433MHz range, a 3.5x more powerful CPU (1.8GHz quad-core), double the RAM at 2GB and double the storage at 8GB.
But it’s the addition of Matter to the other seven communication technologies that really is the headline here. It can act as a Matter controller and will also be a capable Thread border router when Thread is added to the mix in the coming weeks.
At $399 / £399, it’s hardly cheap – you can get the latest SmartThings hub for around a third of the price and it does around 90% of what the Homey Pro is capable of.
Check out the AEOTEC Smart Hub here.
However, Homey’s new top dog is aimed squarely at those people who want to tap into that extra 10%.
It’s way beyond an off-the-shelf option for a casual smart home enthusiast; adding technologies like Infrared, 433 and 868MHz and Bluetooth LE means a that more than 50,000 devices are supported from over 1,000 brands.
Put bluntly, Homey Pro isn’t for everyone but it’s pretty much – on paper at least – the most complete smart home hub for advanced users.
Plus, users can really get granular control using Homey Pro’s Web API to create personalized HomeyScripts and there’s also stuff like Local Port Forwarding, Local API Keys, SSH Access and Local USB Backups to keep matters in a user’s control and out of the cloud.
The Homey Pro has dual-band Wi-Fi on board but can be plugged into your router via an optional Homey Pro Ethernet Adapter and its range can be extended using Homey Bridge devices.
The Homey Pro (Early 2023) is available now, direct from Homey.
We are due to publish our Homey Bridge review soon and we’ll also be putting the new Pro through its paces as soon as we get one in for testing, so stay tuned for that.
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