As the smart home market grows, convenience is becoming one of the biggest measures of success for any given gadget. Sure, you can control your smart LEDs with your phone — but if it’s not easier than using a conventional light switch, who cares?
With that convenience in mind, Logitech released the Pop, a device that controls your smart home gadgets with the ease of a button press. The Logitech Pop works like most other connected buttons, sending personalized commands to smart home gadgets with a single, double or long press. And it works particularly well in homes with multiple occupants and a bunch of smart home tech already built in.
Although the device can’t quite rise above the competition because of the high price for its limited uses ($100 or about £80 for the starter pack, $40 or about £32 for each additional button), it will find a home with many people because it works so well with particular smart home ecosystems.
A simple concept
The Logitech Pop Starter Pack includes two buttons and a plug-in bridge. It works very simply: The buttons connect via Bluetooth to the bridge, which connects using Wi-Fi to the rest of the devices around your house.
This setup might seem simple, but it’s unique in the smart button market. Many competitors anchor themselves to particular phones, rather than a hub. For instance, with the Flic smart button, Mom might not be able to control the lights while Dad is out of the house, because the button relies on his phone to translate its Bluetooth signal into a Wi-Fi command the Philips Hue lights can understand.
Logitech deftly sidesteps this issue by using a hub — making the Pop a more flexible device for multiple users.
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The Logitech Pop will let you control smart home gadgets like lights and locks with the press of a button.
Chris Monroe/CNET
A flexible design
Here’s the full list of devices that work with the Logitech Pop:
It’s not a huge list of partnerships (it’s comparable to the more affordable Flic’s), but the integration with IFTTT vastly expands the capabilities of the Pop button. You can not only control smart home gadgets, but you can toggle any device or service that works with the IFTTT platform — which includes cloud storage services and communication apps, not to mention even more smart home devices. A smart button adds convenience, but it must be flexible enough to accomplish what diverse users want, and IFTTT brings that flexibility.
