Summary
At the core of every smart home system, a hub helps keep things tidy and centralized. There are tons of hubs in the market, as well as devices that can act as a hub, but if you want a dedicated smart home hub that can sit in the center of your living room, this one by SwitchBot might be the one you’ve been looking for.
SwitchBot has just launched its new SwitchBot Hub 3 smart home hub, succeeding its previous Hub 2 product. It builds upon what its predecessor was already doing, and remains a great option not only for modern devices, but also older ones. At its core, the SwitchBot Hub 3 functions as a Matter-enabled hub. With Matter support, the Hub 3 can integrate existing SwitchBot Bluetooth products—such as the company’s popular curtain-closing robots or automated button pushers—into the wider Matter ecosystem. Like the Hub 2 range, it also integrates IR support, keeping compatibility with a wide variety of older products. IR support is probably the biggest selling point ofSwitchBot hubs, so it wouldn’t make sense to take that out.
There are a few key changes compared to this hub’s predecessor that might make it worth the purchase. For one, there’s a new “Dial Master Rotary Controller,” a tactile dial that provides you with physical controls versus having to control everything through the app. The Hub 3 also has dedicated physical, customizable scene buttons directly on the device for quick one-touch activation of automations you’ve put together without having to go through the app.
Furthermore, while the Hub 2 series had some Matter support (mainly to allow existing SwitchBot appliances to become visible on Apple’s HomeKit), the Hub 3 seems to expand on this with support for Matter devices from other brands, helping it work more like a primary smart home hub even if you don’t happen to have a lot of SwitchBot appliances on your house. Fragmentation is a huge issue that hasn’t fully disappeared even today during the Matter age, so it’s good to see companies launch hubs that are able to have some integration with devices made by other brands. Hopefully, this is a trend that will continue as Matter becomes more and more commonplace.
The SwitchBot Hub 3 seems to be a pretty nice improvement over its predecessor, since SwitchHub focused not only on improving upon its latest features, but also made an active effort to make it more interoperable. If you want to get one,it’s now available on Amazon, so verify to grab one. It costs $119.99, which makes it a tad more expensive than the older hubs currently sold by SwitchBot, but it’s probably still an okay price for a versatile smart home hub.
