Wink: Is the (too) easy life upon us?
These days there is an app for everything. Going out for the evening and don’t want to drive home drunk? Lyft, Sidecar and others will pick you up and take you anywhere you want to go all through their apps. Looking for a place to eat and don’t want to group text or facebook status suggestions? Yelp has got you. For every need, want, desire, or dream, there is an app. But while those apps serve one need, a new app, Wink, is looking to take several functions and pull them into one unified app designed to increase your comfort and ease your load.
The “Wink” app looks to put the controls of your entire home in the palm of your hand. Billed on their web page as “A Smarter App For The Smart Home,” Wink’s “simple controls allow you to monitor and manage everything in your home. This means it can do more for you, and you can do less. Finally.”
There are many “Smart Home” products available on the market from companies like GE and Nest. Each brand and device could mean another app. That could get bulky in your phone’s home screen. Worse, many of the brands don’t work with each other. Wink claims to not only connect differing brands but to be able to “teach” them to work in tandem via “In-app Robots.”
For example, you come home from work, opening the garage door with Wink. Doing so turns on the music player, lights in various rooms come on, the temperature raises slightly and the oven begins to preheat. Or your alarm clock sounds in the morning, turning on your Rachio IRO Irrigation controller app that waters your plants while the stove turns on heating your tea kettle. Multiple devices and apps of varying brands all funneling through Wink. Impressive, James Bond-level stuff. And all of this sexiness from one app that consolidates your home’s creature comforts and leaves room on your phone’s home screen.
Another cool feature is that you can monitor how much energy you are using in your home. Wink’s monitoring can actually help you save money on your costly bills. If you have a full smart home, money might not be a problem. But the idea that the power bills at month’s end will be both transparent and controllable, is important to people that are on top of their finances.
What does all this comfort buy you? Convenience. Control. Connection. Personally, I enjoy watering my plants. Its meditative and connective feeding something that is in turn feeding me. But the lights and sound control? As a man with almost as many light sources as moods to set them for, I like the idea of being able to set up for a party or a movie without having to leave the hammock. The smart home is an appealing idea. Consolidating technology and controlling my money is, as well. In the end, what the Wink app does for you is buy time and that is as precious a commodity as there is.
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