SwitchBot Hub 2, a recently announced device from a renowned smart home company. SwitchBot introduced its wholly redesigned Hub 2 at CES 2023. This new matter-supported smart home hub offers innovative design, simple installation, ease of use, and smart factor. Today, we’re going to share an in-depth review of the SwitchBot Hub 2 and determine its actual performance. So, without any more delay, let’s get started!
SwitchBot Hub 2 Review
This is the all-new Hub 2 from ! A new four-in-one smart home hub that also works like an IR controller, and a smart Wi-Fi thermo-hygrometer, which essentially means it can track both the humidity and temperature. At our workplace, we already have Apple Homepod, Google Home, and other smart Assistant devices. And Swithbot was kind enough to send us one, the Hub 2.
At CES 2023, SwitchBot unveiled the latest Hub 2, which features Matter support. The matter is a new standard for smart homes that can connect different smart home ecosystems together to make using different smart home brands even easier. As a result, the SwitchBot ecosystem’s products can now seamlessly integrate with Matter through Hub 2. We have been using the Hub 2 for a while now, and let’s share our user experience now!
Packaging and Accessories
Opening the box, you’ll get the hub itself, and it has kind of a clean look to it. Now, we have the power brick here, a fairly long power cable that has USB-A on one side and USB-C on the other side. On this cable, there’s a temperature and humidity sensor.
Switchbot pulled out it from the hub itself and put the sensor into the cable, so even if the device gets heated, it won’t affect the temperature. So, we got the exact reading of our room’s temperature and humidity! It’s a nice move by Switchbot that they pulled it out from the device, so can we get the exact reading of our room’s temperature and humidity, there’ll be no overheating issues! You’ll also get two extra double-sided sticky tapes and our user manual which got all the guidelines.
Design and Functionalities
The device has a matt finish all around and it’s not heavy at all! You’ll find a neat, little kickstand on its back here that pop-outs easily, it also has a notch cutout that allows the power cable to pass underneath. And underneath that, we’ve got the port for powering the device up. Here we see some instructions about how to bend the cable and attach it. We have a rubber strip at the bottom, so it won’t slip out from the surface!
Setup and Configuration
Let’s plug in the device and set it up with the app! First, let’s click on the plus sign in the app. Now, we’re going to push both buttons on here, and it went into pairing mode with a beep. Let’s click on next. Now, we have to connect it to the Wi-Fi. According to Switchbot, the Hub 2 uses standard 2.4GHz WiFi to connect to our network. And here are some configurations we need to complete. After that, the setup was done.
About The App
So inside the app, is where we found most of the functionalities of this device right here. Our first option was about selecting our Hub 2. Let’s go ahead and click on that. You’ll get to see the temperature and the room humidity. And we also have the room light level, so we can have an idea of what the light level is! and when it’s about this bright in the room. If we tap on that, it’s going to bring the graphs of what is happening! We can either see the graphs about a day, week, month, or year.
On the main interface, there is an option where we can set up our IR appliances. Now, let’s tap on the add remote, and select the Air conditioner, and then it’s going to give us 3 different options. We’ve tried out the smart matching option and got a remote to control our Air Conditioner. We were able to operate our AC like how we operate it with the remote, it is responsive and easy! Then, we also tried the app for our TV, and it seems pretty convenient. So, if we are in a hurry before a match, we won’t have to hunt for the TV remote! Now, we have got our last options at the bottom for controlling our office lights. Moreover, it can support other devices like Google Assistant, Alexa, IFTTT, and Siri.
Now, let’s explore the settings in the top right corner, we got a bunch of different options! The backlight and South, this option allowed us to adjust what the lighting does. We could turn off the indicator light, temperature, and humidity reading, and there are also some options like touch button light, brightness adjustability, and sound.
Let’s go back out of here, now, we’ve got our desired conditions, so we can set up different alerts that we want to use for these devices! Like the temperature alert or the humidity alert! There’s another option to calibrate our device. We can set up different cloud services. We’ve got our NFC tag. We’ve got our matter configuration, which helped us a lot to use multiple smart home devices.
Final Say
Overall, we have had a positive experience with the SwitchBot Hub 2. It has made controlling our smart devices convenient and streamlined, and the Matter integration has made connecting different innovative home ecosystems even easier. We would recommend it to anyone looking for a smart home hub with a variety of features and easy installation. So that was all about SwitchBot Hub 2!
