Wemo shrunk its smart plug again, adds a scene-triggering remote
The Wemo Wifi Smart Plug is smaller than ever at CES 2020, and there's a new Wemo Stage remote control for your smart home scenes, too.
- 10 years product testing experience with the CNET Home team
The Wemo Wifi Smart Plug and Wemo Stage, available later this year.
The Belkin-owned Wemo lineup of Wi-Fi home automation gadgets is a smart home staple -- and at CES 2020, that lineup is getting a little bigger.
Well, sort of.
Yes, the company is adding two new products to the catalog, but one of them is a new version of Wemo's smart plug that's even smaller than the Wemo Mini it'll replace. Available this spring for $25, the newly renamed Wemo Wifi Smart Plug works just like the plug that preceded it, promising to automate anything you plug into it with no need for a hub, and supporting voice control via Alexa, Siri and Google Assistant. It's just a little bit more mini than before.
That's a bit of a yawn for me, given that that the previous plug was already skinny enough not to block off adjacent outlets, but the new plug's smaller stature could still come in handy on something like a power strip, where things tend to get extra crowded.
Perhaps more interesting is Wemo's other new product. It's called the Wemo Stage, and it's a scene-triggering remote control that you can dock in the wall. Beyond triggering Wemo scenes -- such as movie mode lighting or away lighting -- it can also trigger Apple HomeKit scenes. That opens up a lot of utility that extends beyond Wemo's own platform.
With three buttons and the option to map a scene to a normal press or a long press, the Wemo Stage supports up to six scenes at once, all of which can be triggered with a single press. Look for it in stores this summer at an asking price of $50.
Anyway, see you next year for the Wemo Nano, everybody!