UGREEN just announced its first line of smart home products, including a trio of cameras (two outdoor, one indoor), a smart speaker, an ePaper smart frame, and an AI-powered NAS to keep everything safe and local.
If there’s one thing you need to know from all this, it’s that UGREEN has put a lot of thought into this product. From the incredibly easy-to-use hardware design to the cables themselves, the app’s features, and the entire UGREEN HomeAgent family is a marvel of planning and execution.
I received the UGREEN HomeAgent HA100 NAS, SynCare PoE Cam OD600 Pro, and SynCare Indoor Cam ID500 Pro ahead of UGREEN’s Boston-based event and got to spend some time with these products for this hands-on report. UGREEN is launching the HomeAgent HA100 crowdfunding program on September 4, including a 50% discount for early backers until October 27.
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You’ve never used a NAS like this
As someone with 15 years of professional IT experience, I’ve spent plenty of time with big ol’ NAS boxes in server racks. Usually, they’re a pain in the butt to set up, and while they’re mostly a set-it-and-forget-it affair, they’re rarely designed to be user-friendly. A home NAS has to be very different from this approach, and it’s clear UGREEN went back to the drawing board for the HomeAgent HA100.
Everything here is as self-explanatory and user-friendly as you can imagine. I specifically did not read the manual just to see if I could figure it out, and I was able to get the entire package set up in less than 5 minutes once I unboxed everything. A bevy of ports lines the back of the unit, located right underneath the cooling fan with a nifty magnetic filter that’s dead easy to remove and clean.
Underneath the simple magnetic lid is a storage bay for three HDDs of your choice. Standard 3.5″ models pop in with no screwdriver needed, while a 2.5″ drive will need one of the small brackets included in the box. The drives pop in with a satisfying click and are removed with a simple button on top. They can even be locked into place with an included “key,” which can be swapped out with a butter knife if you happen to lose it.
My unit shipped with an AI Accelerator unit already installed, but UGREEN sells models without this compute module for a lower cost. Adding an M.2 SSD is a little trickier since you’ll have to flip the unit over and install it below, then add some thermal tape to keep things cool, but I imagine most people won’t need M.2 performance anyway.
The front of the unit sports a touchscreen that only requires you to select a language to move forward. The unit is paired with the UGREEN NAS app and just requires you to select it from the list of LAN models found on your network. Since this NAS is hardwired to my router, it was as simple as opening the app on my phone and tapping the HA100 in the list.
(Image credit: Nicholas Sutrich / Android Central)
UGREEN’s HomeAgent line supports all Matter-compatible smart home devices, with Zigbee compatibility coming soon. It’s also got full voice command support via UGREEN’s Uliya agent, which is built into the NAS and can be used immediately since the NAS has microphones and speakers on the unit.
My NAS is located behind my couch, so it’s easy to ask Uliya to toggle my lights and switches without having to worry about adding the dedicated speaker to my house, although I may end up getting a secondary speaker for the bedrooms.
(Image credit: Nicholas Sutrich / Android Central)
Central to this unit’s purpose is the all-local-all-the-time philosophy. That AI Accelerator unit is a mini computer that acts similarly to something like Gemini, albeit much more focused than a normal LLM. This one is made specifically for smart home control and to intelligently manage your media.
On the smart home side, it can keep track of familiar faces, understand the difference between a dog and a package, alert you if your chickens get in the front yard (yes, that’s a problem for me), or even wake you if your baby starts crying in the middle of the night. I’ll need time to assess how well each of these works, but it certainly sounds a lot like the smart home I’ve long dreamed of.
And with the pictures and video you can store on the NAS (both from smart home cameras and your smartphones), the AI Accelerator will group events, places, people, and other categories similarly to Google Photos, all without requiring you to pay a monthly fee to store data or for processing.
To say I’m extremely excited about these products is an understatement. From the looks of things so far, this does everything I’ve wanted a smart home to do and then some. Local control and storage are particularly attractive to me, especially since I stopped using Eufy years ago after all those old scandals.
(Image credit: Nicholas Sutrich / Android Central)
Now, I’ve got a proper replacement solution that includes all that awesome local processing, plus the ability to control all my other smart home products using just my voice (thank you, Matter), all without requiring an internet connection. Pinch me, because this feels too good to be true, yet here it is in my living room.
Ugreen has a full roadmap for additional upgrades, including Zigbee device compatibility, a suite of additional voice commands the company is building, and more, which it’ll be building out as the crowdfunding project continues through the end of the year.
