Aqara reveals Matter-powered lock, plug, and hub, to smarten up your home

Door handles and plug sockets don’t tend to cause much excitement in our line of work, unless, of course, they’re smarter than they look. Take The Aqara Smart Lock U300 — newly unveiled alongside the company’s Border Router Plug and Hub M3, it’s one of the first smart locks compatible with Matter over Thread. 

• Read more: What is Matter? The new smart home standard explained

You can dive into the details in our Matter guide, but the upshot is that it’s easier and faster for compatible devices to connect to each other in your home, while using less power to boot. Aqara’s smart lock battery will last up to an impressive eight months at a time, which seems far more reasonable than having to remember to charge your door handle once every few weeks or months. 

Capable of being used both indoors and outdoors, it can be opened in a manner of ways which include fingerprints, PIN codes, NFC, and commands from various voice assistants, including Apple Home.

The Aqara Border Router Plug is, as its name suggests, a smart plug, and one of the first of its kind to feature a built-in Thread router, bridging your Thread network to your home Wi-Fi for a more comprehensive and seamless smart home experience. It also tracks the energy consumption of connected devices in real time, saving curious gadget users from having to resort to a bulky third-party smart plug to achieve the same effect. Not only that, but it can even trigger certain events depending on whether or not the connected device is on or off. You could, for example, automatically have the blinds go down when you turn on your projector — if you’ve got suitable smart blinds, that is.

Lastly, the Aqara Hub M3 features the same Zigbee and infrared capabilities as its predecessor, while adding in Thread, Matter, and Bluetooth smarts. It also features dual-band Wi-Fi and a Power over Ethernet connection for additional flexibility. 

• Read more: All the best news from CES 2024

Esat Dedezade Contributor

About

Esat has been a gadget fan ever since his tiny four-year-old brain was captivated by a sound-activated dancing sunflower. From there it was a natural progression to a Sega Mega Drive, a brief obsession with hedgehogs, and a love for all things tech. After 7 years as a writer and deputy editor for Stuff, Esat ventured out into the corporate world, spending three years as Editor of Microsoft's European News Centre. Now a freelance writer, his appetite for shiny gadgets has no bounds. Oh, and like all good human beings, he's very fond of cats.