You almost certainly don’t need a digital smart lock for your front door. Unless you run a boardinghouse or a bordello, it’s unlikely that you have gone looking for a convenient way to let strangers into your home when you’re away. Nor do you find keys very inconvenient. Keys are portable, they’re durable, they’re cheap to replace and everyone understands how to use them. Yay, keys.
So what explains the tech industry’s infatuation with smart locks, digital devices that can unlock your home using a smartphone? In the past couple of years, a spate of smart locks have hit crowdfunding sites like Kickstarter, some winning multimillion-dollar payouts. One of the biggest crowdfunding hits,
August, was created by the industrial designer Yves Béhar, and shipping to early backers will begin this week.
I've been using it for a week, and I can’t say that it has helped me understand the essential utility of smart locks. At $250, the August lock is more of a chic bauble than a useful necessity. Consider buying one if you want your door to become a piece of conversation, and if you have disposable cash to burn. Or do so with an eye to the future, when the smart lock may be central to an entire home-automation system — the entry device that alerts your lights, air-conditioning and entertainment system that you’re home. But for now, you can probably get by better with keys.
The best thing about the August is that it is very easy to install. The device is a metallic cylinder about the size of a large man’s fist. It comes in red, silver, gold and black. The August attaches to the inside of your deadbolt, the part that you turn to engage the lock. The device comes with clear instructions and all the hardware necessary for installation. I needed a screwdriver and about 10 minutes to get it on my front door. After it is installed, you can still use the deadbolt the old-fashioned way. Inside, you can turn the August to lock your door; outside, you can still use your old keys.
But the August also lets you open your door with your phone instead of your key. There are two ways of doing so. First, in manual mode, you pull out your phone when you are at your door, open the August app, sign into the app if you haven’t already, wait half a second for the app to connect to the lock, and then tap the icon to open.
Sound more complicated than keys? It is. That is why there is also an automatic mode that uses your phone’s location to open the door just as you’re walking up to it. The problem is, in my tests, this worked only occasionally. Sometimes I would walk up to the door and find it unlocked; other times, nothing happened.
And there was an additional complication. In my house, I can enter through the front door or through the garage. When I come in through the garage, I pass by the front door — and my August unlocked it for me, even though I was already in the house. This left my door unlocked, and it would stay that way until I manually locked it.
The August’s main attraction is the ability to issue “keys” to anyone who uses an iOS or Android device. The app lets you do so in a number of ways — keys can be issued permanently, on a temporary basis, or just on a schedule, like for a maid service that needs to enter your house only once a week. Because the lock creates an audit trail of every action, you can also see who is entering your house and how long each person has been there. And you can revoke keys or sign in on a friend’s phone to open your lock, useful if you have lost your phone.
But one thing you cannot do with the August is log on from afar to check if your door is locked. That’s because the lock’s only wireless connection is to a phone through Bluetooth, which only works from a few feet away. The August does not permanently connect to the Internet through your home’s Wi-Fi connection. The company says this limitation is meant to preserve battery life; the lock’s four AAs need to be changed about once a year.
As a result, the lock is sometimes less than smart. If you are at work and can’t remember whether you locked your door that morning, you can’t check on it. In fact, you can’t check if your door is locked even in most places in your house. The only way to do so is to walk to your door and eyeball it. How smart is that?
Nothing's ever happend to you...until it does.
