IT Blog | Mr. HiTech Tech Blog

Today’s big CES news was all about TVs. LG and Samsung have figured out that they need to make the equivalent of concept cars for TV: stuff that grabs your attention, is a little outlandish, and will be purchased by precisely 28 people (29 for the good stuff). Chris Welch went out and looked at all of it, so I encourage you to click through the links below. The video with Samsung’s rotating Sero TV in particular is great. I’ll let Chris do a proper analysis of the TV trends at CES later in the week instead of doing something myself here. The pixels need just a little more time to warm up anyway. Instead, I want to briefly write about my favorite CES announcement so far. Yesterday I wrote about how CES is a place where we can actually pay attention to the things smaller companies are making instead of only caring about the giants. So I’m putting my newsletter where my mouth is and writing about my favorite thing so far, which happens to come from a company you might not be familiar with. It’s the Netatmo’s HomeKit smart lock, which uses physical NFC keys. When you hear NFC, you probably just think of tapping your phone on to something. So you’d naturally assume that this is just a smart lock you tap an NFC key on to open it. Nope. It’s an actual key-shaped key. You have to put it in the lock and turn it, just like a regular key. But where a regular key has a bunch of teeth that have to be ground into it by a locksmith, this key uses NFC. I love it because it gives you many of the benefits of having a smart lock with way fewer downsides. Let me explain: Because it uses NFC to authenticate into the lock instead of ground-down metal, you can program these keys yourself. You don’t have to go visit a locksmith to “change your lock” or to get a new key made. You can just order some keys and tap a few buttons in an app. Because these keys are just NFC codes and the locks are just NFC readers, there’s no reason a single key couldn’t unlock multiple different locks. You could mix and match access to doors however you like just as if you were some kind of office manager. Because it’s a physical lock and doesn’t have a motor in it, you can power it with four AAA batteries and don’t need to change them very often. It unfortunately doesn’t offer all the advanced remote unlock features you get with more sophisticated locks, but that tradeoff might be worth it. Because it’s a smart lock, you can still unlock it through the app (or with HomeKit) if you lose your key. On top of all that, Netatmo doesn’t charge you a monthly fee. Netatmo is a French company that’s been around for eight or nine years and while it doesn’t
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