GoKawiilis a senior reviewer with over twenty years of experience. She covers smart home, IoT, and connected tech, and has written previously for Wirecutter, Wired, Dwell, BBC, and US News.
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Smart homes have gotten really good at making things really complicated. Turning on a light can involve multiple steps, compared to just flipping a switch. Homey, the Dutch-based smart home platform owned by LG, thinks it has a solution.
This week it launched the Homey Portal, a touchscreen smart home controller that looks very promising, if very expensive. Preorders open today at an introductory price of $249/€249, with units shipping in December.
A 2.8-inch round touchscreen device with a stainless steel dial, the Homey Portal can sit on a desk or mount to the wall and is powered by a USB-C cable. You tap the icons to control devices like lights, speakers, thermostats, and shades, and you can twist the dial to adjust brightness, volume, and temperature.
The idea of a dedicated smart home control device that can connect to everything in a smart home is compelling. App, voice, and button control have their place, but they’re not as easy as walking up to a switch and just knowing what to do. The problem so far has been interoperability; not everything works with everything. Homey, with its claimed support for over 70,000 devices from over 2,000 brands, plus Matter, Zigbee, Z-Wave, and Thread, is well-positioned to tackle this.
The Portal invites comparisons to an Echo Show or Google Nest Hub, but it feels more focused. “We’ve always wanted a smart home to feel as simple as flipping a light switch,” said Stefan Witkamp, CEO at Athom, Homey’s parent company. It’s designed to give a direct, physical way to control your home, “instead of doing everything through an app,” he said.
In many ways, the Portal looks like the smart home controller I’ve always envisioned Apple building for Apple Home: simple, intuitive, and uncluttered.
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