The cameraless, petite Google Home Hub will blend into any room in your home. It's affordable, and quite useful as a digital assistant (especially in the kitchen), a photo frame and a smart home control panel.
The Google Home Mini stands tall as one of the best affordable smart speakers out there, along with the Amazon Echo Dot, but it doesn't do enough to supplant the Dot at the top of the list.
Apple's HomePod doesn't match the features offered on Alexa and Google Assistant speakers. But if you’re an iPhone user who prizes sound quality above all, you should seriously consider this speaker.
The Google Home is a great smart speaker with a ton of capabilities, but you have so many smart speaker options at this point that I'm less inclined to recommend this well balanced middle child.
Amazon's touchscreen Alexa device shows potential for people interested in video chatting with friends and family members, but it needs a little more development before we'd recommend it.
While the Wink Hub has some design and usability kinks to work out, its affordability and versatility make it a very desirable option for whole-home automation.
The Bond is an easy way to control your ceiling fan with a phone, as well as Amazon Alexa devices or the Google Home. HomeKit users will need to look elsewhere, and you'll need to have access to your fan's current IR or RF remote.
The Wink Hub 2 is fine, but it's hard to recommend over platforms like Amazon Alexa and Apple HomeKit that reduce challenging behind-the-scenes integrations to simple voice commands.
SmartThings' impressive performance and wide array of potential applications make it easy to recommend, but its underwhelming app adds a lot of frustration to an otherwise excellent system.
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