Wink sells a line of smart home products including hubs, motion sensors, door and window sensors, and chimes. The company’s systems also work with third-party smart lights, cameras, doorbells, and other accessories. And up until recently, you could use Wink’s products for free after paying for the hardware.
Then this week the company announced it was launching a Wink Subscription service. This isn’t a premium service that offers additional features. It’s what you have to pay to continue using the gear you’ve already paid for and used for free until now.
Oh, and the company only gave users a week’s notice. The subscription requirement kicks in on May 13, 2020.
Unsurprisingly, existing customers are not happy. As of Friday afternoon, Wink’s tweet announcing the move has 21 likes and over 1,100 replies — mostly negative. Folks on reddit aren’t any happier about it.
Should it have been foreseeable that a one-time fee for hardware that relies on cloud services wasn’t going to be sustainable indefinitely? Maybe. But was this what customers signed up for? Certainly not.
Here’s a roundup of recent tech news from around the web.
- Wink smart home users have one week to subscribe or be shut off [Engadget]
What’s crazy is that it’s entirely plausible that a large number of Wink customers probably don’t even know their smart home hubs will stop working in less than a week. If you missed the tweets and blog post and don’t pay close attention to every company email that hits your inbox, it’d be easy to miss the announcement that you’ve got to pay up in less than a week or lose service. - MediaTek Unveils 5G-Integrated Dimensity 1000+ Chip for Smartphones [MediaTek]
MediaTek introduces Dimensity 1000+ chip with support for 5G phones featuring up to a 144 Hz display. It seems like a modest spec bump to last year’s Dimensity 1000 (which topped out at 120 Hz). Devices with the new chip are coming soon. - Chip Battle: Dimensity 1000+ Versus Dimensity 1000 [GizmoChina]
Wait, so what’s the difference between MediaTek’s Dimensity 1000 and 1000+ chips? This article breaks down the new features including 144 Hz display support, SDR to HDR conversion, and better resource management. - Meizu announces new Meizu 17 and 17 Pro flagships [Anandtech]
Meizu launches the Meizu 17 and Meizu 17 Pro smartphones with Snapdragon 865, 6.6 inch AMOLED 90 Hz display, a 4500 mAh battery, and a whole bunch of cameras. - Google’s next streaming device will shake up the Android TV world [Protocol]
Report: Google’s next media streamer could be an Android TV dongle with a new UI that emphasizes content (specific movies and TV shows) on the home screen rather than channels/providers (Netflix, Hulu, Amazon, etc). - Introducing TiVo Stream 4K [TiVo]
It’s an Android TV media streamer with a custom user interface and an introductory price of $50 for a limited time.
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Follow this (https://www.instructables.com/id/Uber-Home-Automation-w-Arduino-Pi/), and this will never happen to you.
It also won’t spy on you for profit.
It might look uglier unless you get more creative with your cases than that guy, but all those white blobs stuck all over the walls look kinda ugly anyway.
That’s fine for the 5% who are tech savvy enough and have the time to create their own home grown version, but for the vast majority of consumers, retail products are hard enough to wrestle with to get working.