A scary price for this Monster plug

Hi, I'm Andrew Gebhart for CNet. Today I'm taking a look at the Monster Central Power Control Kit. The idea here is pretty simple. You plug this into a wall and then you plug any electronic you want into here. That allows you to use the Monster app to remotely control whatever you plugged in. Say you have a lamp plugged in here. Now from the office you can turn on your living room light, you can set schedules, this thing will also monitor the energy of it for you, and it will provide some surge protection. To connect to the internet you'll also need to hook this hub directly into your router. This guy will talk to this guy and boom, you'll have a connection. Connection. So 140 bucks is a lot for this, and I mean like a whole lot. Now maybe that'd be okay if Monster invented something brand new to help you take a first step into the smart home, except that there's a million other devices that do the exact. The same thing as this and costs a lot less. D-Link, iDevices, Quirky, iHome, Insteon, Grid Connect, all of which offer wider interoperability, some of which are gonna be HomeKit compatible. And all of them cost way less than 140 bucks. So look, it's not that this thing doesn't work, it's fine. It'll flip your light switch on or off. But honestly, pulling up the app and having to press three buttons to get your light to turn on, you're sort of gonna miss just going up and flipping the light switch. But it offers remote functionality with only a little bit of lag. It has energy readings, but it's not enough to redeem. In this thing. Monster's a well known brand, and maybe they're counting on that. And the fact that a lot of people still aren't very familiar with a smart. And honestly, a smart plug is a great way to get started with home automation. But there are better, cheaper options out there that offer more interoperability. Go with any one of those. Over the $140 Monster Central Power Control Kit. For CNET, I'm Andrew Gebhart. [MUSIC]