Every year, we test a wide range of impressive smart home gadgets, from smart displays to intelligent vacuum cleaners, and now the time has come to celebrate the very best of recent times.
The 20th annual Pocket-lint Awards, sponsored by new EE, were held on 9 November 2023 – celebrating the best devices across a wide range of products. In each category, we narrowed things down to a shortlist of six nominees, all of them having been reviewed in full by the Pocket-lint team in the last 12 months.
Our smart home category was one of the most competitive, full of devices with very different aims and features, all uniformly excellent additions to a smart home ecosystem. There can only be one winner, though.
Smart Home Device of the Year: Philips Hue
Philips Hue Starter Kit
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Philips Hue is an unbelievable addition to any smart home, but also the perfect place to start from zero. Total control over your lighting is something that you won’t be able to live without once you try it.
Philips Hue retains its crown – this isn’t the first time it’s won our Smart Home Device of the Year category, and if Philips can continue adding new features, bulbs and lighting options it likely won’t be the last.
Hue’s smart lighting has been a mainstay in our homes and estimations for ages now, an ecosystem of lighting options that keeps expanding and reinventing itself with new features, bulb types, synchronisations and designs.
It’s just as vital in 2023 as it’s ever been, too, thanks to continued updates to make its app easier to manage and its integrations deeper than ever, making it easy to sync your bulbs up to movies, games and more, set up scenes in your home and totally manage the vibe of your lighting with hardly any effort.
Highly commended: Ring Battery Doorbell Plus
The biggest name in video doorbells for a reason, Ring’s Battery Doorbell Plus is another excellent option for those who don’t want to rewire their entire home to get some great smart security features – it’s so easy to install and pretty much instantly lets you feel like you’re living the smart home life.
It has great video quality and a really wide field of view to ensure that you can always see who’s at your door, and with a range of great features in Ring’s software, you can easily set up alerts and more.
The best of the rest
Amazon Echo Show 5
Amazon’s refresh of the Echo Show 5 is a really superb bit of work, giving it the best design it’s ever had, with nicer bezels and a lovely sturdy little body. It’s about as compact a smart display as you can get and a great way to get an even more powerful Alexa experience in whatever room you prefer.
Being able to display your favourite photos, bits of handy information, timers, and loads of other options makes it a genuinely useful bit of smart home tech, and it also has better sound than ever before.
Arlo Pro 5
Home security has come a long way – the days of CCTV footage being grainy and hard to use are long gone, and the Arlo Pro 5 is the perfect embodiment of that progress. It offers easy installation and can work without any other kit, which is a huge boon if you just want to cover one porch or area without going all in on a whole system.
The video it records is crisper and clearer than ever, its app is incredibly simple to get used to, and it basically arrives as an all-in-one solution if you’re worried about security for any reason.
Husqvarna R4 Aspire
If you’ve got a big lawn (or set of lawns) on your property, you definitely know the pain of mowing it all the time, and while they’re not the cheapest, automated robot mowers are now hugely popular for obvious reasons. This Husqvarna model shows that they don’t have to be massive monstrosities, though, with a lovely, sleek design.
Once you get it all set up, you’ll be able to basically forget about lawn maintenance, which is a huge thing depending on how much you normally have to work on it, making it a pretty brilliant addition to any home.
Ring Battery Doorbell PluRoborock S8 Pro Ultra
A robot vacuum is an essential addition to any home; you don’t want to vacuum yourself all the time – which goes for most homes, we’d wager. Roborock has long been one of our top picks in this space, and the S8 Pro Ultra is one of its most accomplished devices ever.
This super-powerful vacuum will clean your home so ably that you’ll chuckle at anyone who throws shade in the direction of robot helpers, and its ability to self-clean removes one of the few hurdles that you might otherwise face, making it a dream to use.
How the EE Pocket-lint Awards judging works
The winner for the Smart Home Device category is decided by the Pocket-lint team, along with a panel of expert judges from publications across the industry. Following a rigorous scoring process, the Best Smart Home Device winner for 2023 was announced at an in-person event on 9 November 2023, along with the winners from the other 20 categories.
A Product of the Year winner was also announced, chosen from the winners of the 21 categories.
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