August Home is now an old-timer in the smart lock field, with more than five years of history devoted to a single product category. And at long last, August has released the third generation of its flagship product: the August Smart Lock Pro.
The Smart Lock Pro keeps the old cylindrical August appearance, but the company has also developed a cost-reduced August Smart Lock. Both are still retrofit products, designed to be used with existing deadbolt hardware. Only the interior hardware is changed during installation.
We received pre-release samples of both locks and will cover each in turn. Note that all testing was performed during the beta release (just days before launch), and we did encounter a (known) issue during the Pro lock setup, and also encountered quite a few hiccups with the app. (To be honest: The app crashed constantly during testing.) For the most part, I will chalk these issues up to immaturity and expect they will be resolved before the locks hit the market in earnest.
August Home
- August Smart Lock Pro
- August Smart Lock 3rd Generation
August Smart Lock Pro
Let’s start with the big gun, the new August Smart Lock Pro, which has a near-identical design to the original August lock, a silvery hockey puck that is decidedly contemporary in design. The significant change is that the August Connect—a separate device that bridges the Bluetooth-only lock to your Wi-Fi network and myriad smart home hubs, including Alexa and Wink—is now included in the box and does not have to be purchased separately.
While that’s handy, it remains disappointing that August didn’t integrate the Connect directly into the lock itself. Instead, the Connect device, which hasn’t changed, must still be permanently plugged in to a nearby electrical outlet.
One of the biggest issues with all smart locks is that while the lock may know if it is engaged or not, it doesn’t necessarily know whether the door is open or closed. August has attempted to remedy this by the inclusion of DoorSense, which is designed to tell August whether the door is ajar or not. The primary benefit here is found if you turn on auto-locking, in which a timer automatically engages the lock after it’s been unlocked for a certain amount of time. With DoorSense, the auto-lock won’t engage if the door has been left open. In fact, the app updates to show you that the door’s ajar, too, which can be very handy on its own.
[“Source-timesofindia”]
