The pick when you'd rather not live inside Amazon's interface. Roku's home screen is famously plain and even-handed, putting your apps front and center without steering you toward one service. It streams 4K with vivid HDR, and the hardware is tidy: the stick powers from the TV's own USB so there's no wall plug, and the slim design won't block the neighboring HDMI port. The included remote handles TV power and volume and takes voice search. All the top apps live in one place, and a travel-friendly setup lets you take your logins to a hotel TV without signing into someone else's account. Simple, fast, and refreshingly neutral.

The Matter badge is what sets this Tapo mini apart: instead of locking you into one app, it joins Apple Home, Alexa, Google Home, and Samsung SmartThings natively, so you can run it from whichever ecosystem you already live in. Matter also brings smooth local control, meaning it keeps responding over your LAN even if your home internet drops, and it's positioned to stay compatible as the standard evolves. The compact, flame-retardant body avoids blocking the neighboring outlet and carries UL certification plus a two-year warranty. Bluetooth onboarding makes setup quick, and beyond app and voice control you get the usual scheduling and timers for lamps, fans, and seasonal lights.

A sprinkler controller that waters on the weather, not a dumb timer — it pulls local forecasts and skips cycles before rain, which is where the water-bill savings (and utility rebates) come from. A DIY swap for most existing systems in under an hour, and the app is the best in the category. It wants the separate enclosure outdoors; 8 zones covers most homes, 16-zone for bigger yards.

The D30 Ultra brings flagship dock automation down a tier. Suction is the headline at 25,000Pa, paired with a floating rubber brush and a TriCut brush that cuts through long hair to prevent tangles. The mopping is where it earns its keep: dual rotary pads scrub under pressure for stuck-on spills, the pads extend up to 4cm to reach edges and corners most robots miss, and the dock washes and drains them in real time so they stay residue-free. Ultrasonic carpet detection lets you pick per-carpet modes — raise the mop, boost suction, or avoid entirely. Fast charging and a 5,200mAh battery deliver up to 230 minutes of runtime.

The 16-foot length is the whole point: this Hue Solo strip is made for long runs, behind a wide TV, along a staircase, or under a stretch of cabinets where shorter strips fall short. It pushes a bright 1,700 lumens and, true to Hue's standard, uses dedicated RGBWW LEDs rather than mixing RGB to fake white, so both colors and whites look honest. Install is stick-plug-go, and you can cut it to fit, just remember the cut is permanent. Out of the box you get solid lighting, but the automations, away-from-home control, and Matter integration only open up once you add a Hue Bridge. Premium color, premium price.

The device that finally shows you where the power bill actually goes—whole-home plus up to 16 individual circuits, real-time in the app to about ±2%, UL-listed and even ready for solar net-metering. For anyone chasing waste or sizing a battery, it's the ground truth. The honest barrier: it installs inside the breaker panel, so it really wants a licensed electrician.

A serious tri-band Wi-Fi 7 mesh for a big, device-dense home. The three-pack covers up to 7,600 square feet and is rated for more than 200 devices, the headroom a house full of cameras, plugs, and TVs actually needs. BE10000 speeds run up to 5,188 Mbps on 6GHz, 4,324 on 5GHz, and 574 on 2.4GHz for 4K and 8K streaming or AR/VR gaming. The wiring is future-proofed too, with a 10G WAN/LAN port, four 2.5G ports, and USB 3.0, and a tri-band backhaul keeps units talking without stealing your bandwidth. AI-Roaming hands devices between nodes seamlessly, and TP-Link HomeShield adds security and parental controls. Sold for U.S. use.

Arlo's wireless 2K doorbell pairs sharper-than-1080p video with a wide 180-degree field of view, so you catch faces and floor-level packages in one frame. Night vision, a motion sensor, two-way audio, and a built-in siren round out a capable front-door setup. What makes this bundle worth it is the included Chime 2: doorbell presses and motion alerts ring audibly inside the house, so you don't need an Echo or hub to hear someone at the door. Plan for the recurring cost, though — cloud video storage and the smarter people, package, and vehicle detection live behind a paid Arlo Secure plan once the trial ends.

The kettle that turns pour-over coffee from guesswork into a ritual—a precise gooseneck spout, to-the-degree temperature control, a built-in brew timer, and a hold mode that keeps water exactly where you want it. It even pulls new features over Wi-Fi firmware updates. The honest part: it's expensive for a kettle, and the 0.9-liter capacity is built for pour-over, not filling a row of mugs.

A small fix for a common annoyance: doorbell and camera alerts you miss because your phone's in another room. This plug-in Chime pushes Ring notifications out loud through the house, and the 3rd-gen speaker is louder and clearer than before. It goes into any standard wall outlet—no wiring, no fuss—and the slim, curved design stays out of the way. You can personalize tones, volume, and snooze settings so it's only as loud and as frequent as you want. Just be clear on what it is: an accessory that extends an existing Ring doorbell or camera setup, not a device that works on its own.

The streamer to buy if your house runs on Apple. The A15 chip keeps the interface fast and ad-free, pushes 4K Dolby Vision and Atmos, and the box doubles as a HomeKit hub and Thread border router—so it quietly becomes the brain of your Apple smart home. The trade-offs are price and lock-in: it costs more than a Fire or Roku stick, and the cheaper 64GB model drops the Ethernet port the 128GB version keeps.

Made for the fixtures where the bulb is the decor: pendants, exposed sockets, and Edison-style lamps. The tubular filament shape looks the part, but inside it's a full LIFX color bulb, with SuperColor delivering far richer saturation than typical RGB and white tuning from a warm 1500K to a crisp 9000K. The trick most filament bulbs can't match is 52 independently controlled zones in one E26, giving you real gradients, fire and aurora effects, and per-zone music sync. Setup is painless: screw in, scan the QR for HomeKit, no hub needed. It works natively with HomeKit, Alexa, and Google over Matter, and answers to all three by voice.

The insurance policy that pays you back the first time a pipe lets go—it watches the main line, runs daily health tests that catch a drip as small as one drop a minute, and automatically shuts off the water on a detected leak or freeze, reporting flow, pressure, and temperature to the app. The cost is real: it needs professional plumbing on the 3/4-inch main and carries a premium price.

The Cube's clever trick is its shape: the body extends for full capacity or nests down for storage, so it isn't a bulky eyesore the rest of the year. It pulls up to 20 pints a day across 1,500 sq ft and adjusts humidity from 35% to 85%, making it a sensible basement, bathroom, or crawlspace unit. The larger tank means far fewer trips to empty it, and for set-and-forget you run the included hose to a drain or sink. The SmartHome app plus Alexa or Google voice control let you adjust it remotely, while auto-restart resumes your settings after an outage and a washable filter saves on replacements.

The lock that unlocks before you touch it. The U400's headline is UWB—your iPhone or Apple Watch in your pocket trips the door as you walk up, no codes, no scanner—and it backstops that with fingerprint, keypad, NFC, app, and a physical key so nobody's ever stuck outside. Matter over Thread lets it sit on Apple, Alexa, Google, and Home Assistant at once, and the rechargeable battery tops up over USB-C instead of a drawer of AAs. The fine print: UWB approach-unlock leans on the Apple side, voice unlocking is Apple/Alexa only, and it's a tall deadbolt. The most forward-looking lock on this page.

The right answer for a bedroom, kitchen, dorm, or guest room where a 32-inch screen is plenty and the budget is tight. It's 720p HD rather than 4K — which is fine at this size and viewing distance — and ships fully smart with Fire TV built in, so Prime Video, Netflix, Hulu, HBO Max, Disney+, YouTube and thousands of channels are ready out of the box. The included Alexa Voice Remote handles search, launching, and input switching by voice. Connectivity is better than you'd expect at the price: two HDMI ports with ARC, composite, optical and coax, plus DTS Virtual-X sound and parental PIN controls for shared rooms.