The Samsung SmartThings center is suitable with a wide variety of smart house gadgets. The Discover Gadgets function of the SmartThings app didn’t work with any of the devices I added, requiring me to look up each gadget by typing it into the app. If you were connecting just Samsung SmartThings gadgets, this procedure would most likely be a lot smoother.

Rooms

One thing I like about the SmartThings app is the capability to arrange your devices by space. Because I evaluated only two gadgets, I didn’t really need this function. But if I had a whole houseful of wise devices, it would make it a lot easier to identify every one from the app.

Scenes

The SmartThings app lets you create customized scenes to manage numerous devices with one touch. You could develop a scene called Good Morning that turns off your smart home security and turns on your coffee maker and a kitchen area light.

Night Lighting turned on my workplace lamp to 20% brightness and turned on the string of lights I ‘d plugged into the wise outlet. Work Lighting turned off the wise outlet and turned on the office lamp to complete brightness.

While both scenes performed completely, I was perplexed that I couldn’t simply push the scene icon again to turn the scene off, turning all the lights off at when. To work around the concern, I developed a third scene that might operate as an off button for the other scenes.

Automations

SmartThings automations utilize an IFTTT-type procedure so you can set specific conditions to activate particular devices. Conditions can be based on your phone’s place, time of day, app mode (e.g., House or Away), or the status of another gadget.

I ran a couple of various automations based upon the time of day and my area, but I discovered that I needed to make certain automations didn’t hinder each other: I had an automation that would turn lights on at 6 p.m. and off at 9 p.m. A second automation would turn lights on when I got back. If I had the first automation running and I arrived home at 10 p.m., after the wise lights had actually been turned off, then they would not turn on, since they were still under the direction of the first automation.

Much like creating scenes, it was like a challenging logic puzzle to figure out how to get the automations to work the way I wanted them to, once I arranged it out, the center worked fine. As soon as again, I would have appreciated more in-app guidance, maybe with some warnings to let me know when one automation I was creating was going to interfere with another one.

Voice Control

As a mother, most likely my preferred part of checking the SmartThings hub was linking it to my Amazon Alexa so I might use voice commands to control my gadgets and scenes. While sitting in my office, I might just say, “Alexa, turn on Work Lighting,” and she ‘d say, “Okay,” and my desk light would turn on at full brightness.

Compatibility

Here are a few smart device brand names that deal with SmartThings:

• Amazon Alexa
• Google Home
• Philips Hue
• Ring
• ADT
• Schlage
• Honeywell
• LIFX
• Ecobee
• Bose

Discover a total list of SmartThings-compatible gadgets on the SmartThings website.