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The best smart home products of 2017.
It’s been a banner year for the smart home, with new players and new products flooding the market. It’s never been easier or less expensive to convert an ordinary home into a technological wonderland. The biggest developments have come with the widespread adoption of voice control, with Amazon’s Echo family way out in front in terms of new products and third-party support. But the Noon Lighting System, which shipped late in the year, is easily the most exciting smart home product we’ve seen to date.

We reviewed a lot of great products this year—and we encountered a few dogs as well—but this list represents our picks for the best of the best. Products needn’t to have been introduced in 2017 for consideration (though they of course had to be available for purchase), and a handful of contenders didn’t arrive in time for us to consider: The Google Home Max, the Nest Protect, and of course the delayed Apple HomePod. We’ll review those as soon as we can. But for now, these are the best smart home products.

Samsung didn’t invent SmartThings, but they were smart enough to snap up the startup in its early days. Since that time, the SmartThings platform has gained broad compatibility and melded with other systems. Samsung built it into a mesh router, the Samsung Connect Home, and into a USB dongle that can be plugged into the Nvidia Shield TV streaming box.

There’s a wide universe of SmartThings components for virtually every aspect of the smart home, and where Samsung doesn’t offer a device, you can be sure that some third-party manufacturer has stepped in to fill the gap.