If you're a fan of smart home technology, you'll want to know about LG's latest product. The company has unveiled its first dedicated smart home hub, the ThinQ ON. This innovative device, which was teased earlier this year at CES, will make its official debut at the IFA 2024 tech show in Berlin, Germany, next week.
Meet the LG ThinQ ON: A smart hub for your home
The ThinQ ON is designed to be the centre of your smart home. It's powered by artificial intelligence and can connect and control LG appliances and other smart home devices via popular protocols like Thread, Matter, and Wi-Fi. The hub works on LG's ThinQ smart home platform, which uses “Affectionate Intelligence”. This allows the device to learn from your habits, monitor your appliances, and even enable voice control of connected devices.
This smart hub comes in a small, sleek, circular white design and doubles as a smart speaker with LG's AI voice assistant built in. The company says this assistant is designed to understand natural language, interpret context, and learn your preferences over time. This is powered by LG's AI chipset, which the company claims was created with future upgrades in mind, so you can expect it to stay relevant as technology evolves.
Like most smart home hubs, the ThinQ ON allows you to control and monitor your connected devices, create routines, and automate through the LG ThinQ app. It is also Matter-certified, which means it can work with various smart home products from different brands. According to LG, the hub will support multiple network connectivity options, including Wi-Fi and Thread, making it compatible with various LG devices and an increasing number of appliances and IoT devices from other manufacturers.
A step forward for LG in the smart home space
A key part of LG's strategy for expanding its smart home capabilities is the recent acquisition of Athom, the company behind the Homey Pro hub, which supports hundreds of smart home device integrations. While it's unlikely that all of Homey's integrations will be available on the ThinQ ON right from the start, this move suggests that LG is serious about becoming a more significant player in the smart home market.
Until now, LG's approach to the smart home has been mostly focused on controlling its own appliances. The release of the ThinQ ON marks a significant shift towards creating a more comprehensive smart home platform similar to Samsung's SmartThings. This development means you'll soon be able to integrate even more devices into your LG smart home ecosystem, giving you greater flexibility and control.
Earlier this year, LG announced that some of its TVs would function as Matter-enabled Google Home Hubs. You can set up and control any Matter-compatible smart home devices, including LG, Google, and other Google Home devices, directly through the ThinQ app. We expect to learn more about the device at IFA 2024, where it will be officially launched.
