Anyone see this?
Samsung’s new SmartThings Station is a hub, smart button, and wireless charger
Samsung is reviving its efforts at first-party SmartThings hubs.
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This is more interesting than I thought it would be, but I’m honestly amazed if you don’t get interference from the wireless charging. But maybe you don’t. 
Again, no zwave…but zigbee and Thread.
I’ll wait to hear the live field reports on this one.
It does look like a really nice device for somebody who’s all in on Samsung devices. Find your phone, earbuds, tablets, and anything you’ve attached a galaxy smarttag + to.
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i’m still shocked its only $60! Aeotec has to be pissed. How are they going to sell a $130 SmartThings hub?!
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They’ll sell it to people who want Z wave, I guess.
I find the ‘hub everywhere’ approach rather bizarre, particularly in TVs and kitchen appliances, but I also don’t know much about any of these ‘hubs’.
We already have the WiFi hubs seemingly lagging months/years behind the V2/V3/Aeotec hubs and rarely seeming to get a software update in comparison. But none of these other hubs seem to be troubling the scorers at all. I’ve no idea how their hardware or firmware compares.
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I thought perhaps the new Zooz Z-box hub would be an alternative for Z-wave (in the US at least) but it’s $120 on sale.
Does Silicon Labs levy a fee on Z-wave devices that makes them more expensive?
Yes.
They are trying to shift that as they have now released the architecture so that other companies can create Z wave chips, but for now, yes.
And on top of that, the certification process is relatively expensive, but that’s part of what gave Zwave its advantage for light switches and locks: with the rare exception of hubs like smartthings which added their own architecture layers, Zwave really is pretty interoperable throughout the industry.
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I can imagine a flood of people complaining that the phone is charging and devices fall off the network. It just seems to be a bad idea to put a phone on a Zigbee, Thread hub.
Isn’t Aeotec owns the ZWave production as well? That is their fair share above the 60$.
With the new Matter approach and border routers it make sense to spread even coverage around the house.
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To me it seems to be a bad idea to have a hub anywhere you could easily put a phone on top of it, whether it is a wireless charger or not. It just seems too little like a good place to position a hub for good coverage, and too much like somewhere to plonk a mug of tea.
It makes sense to have repeating/routing elements around to improve coverage, but we are talking about Smartthings Hubs which are a whole lot more than that. It makes no sense to create a dependence on TVs and appliances as hosts. If the hub hardware was modular and could be moved to a different host if required, or similarly if hub configurations were completely portable between hosts, then fair enough. However even then support for multiple SmartThings Hubs isn’t really where it needs to be yet.
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I don’t know how they sell a $130 SmartThings hub anyway. That’s double the price I’d want to pay.
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It is exactly 130 more than what I want to pay for it. 
Interesting.
For me, any hub less than $250 implies a “lite” design, probably not robust enough to run a reliable full scale network. Even moreso for multiple protocols. You know, something that’s probably been stripped of utilities, routing information, limited network size, straining for memory, no agile frequency management, maybe even no backup/restore capabilities.
Oh, wait…
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Let em eat cake…Aeotec took over samsungs design i.n which they had zero R&D costs involved, slapped a higher price on it, and botched its debut and enjoy nothing but pure profit so they have no right to be pissed about anything whatsoever.
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Another factor could be the supply chain issues Aeotec had during the pandemic. How often was it out of stock? bringing a hub back in-house with Samsung’s supply chain power makes sure consumers can actually buy them.
What did did the hub cost before then? In the UK and Europe distribution seems to have been improved immeasurably by Aeotec and the price hasn’t really changed much. The other SmartThings branded stuff had patchy availability and eye watering prices at times and that has been improved on with more realistic pricing.
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My Amazon history shows that I paid $US85 for my V2 hub in May, 2018.
It lists the same hub as available new now, from a third party seller, for $US190
As far as I am concerned, Z-Wave is important to my smart home. I also wish that SmartThings would get the transfer of devices to a new hub easier. This is a major flaw in SmartThings.
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Me too. Mostly because I’ve got 30 Z-wave devices that are all less than 5 years old.
If I was starting over or could afford to throw away my investment in those, I probably would avoid Z-wave.
I said it in another post about this and I’ll say it again here, heat and devices like this don’t mix. Wireless chargers produce lots of heat. That on top of all those radio waves just screams bad idea.
I know what they are probably thinking. This device can sit on the catch-all counter we all tend to have in our homes. The place a wireless charger is probably already sitting. It’s in a wide open space instead of a closet or shoved in an entertainment center.
You know what would be a better idea, make a hub with 4x the memory and 4x the processing power of the V2 and put it in a nice housing the size of a smoke detector. Give the option to mount it like that too.
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Any retailer selling V2 Hubs for stupid prices has ‘new old’ stock and is just seeing what the market will bare.
I see the same happening with Ikea Tradfri on eBay. Inflated prices for products that are readily available from Ikea stores (or mail order) for half the price.
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