Gadget Weekly
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The SwitchBot Universal Remote aims to reduce clutter and unify all your home device controls into one physical tool as opposed to your phone or smart speaker’s smart assistant. This includes both smart home devices as well as other electronics that depend on infrared remote controls.
Gone are the days when IR blasters were a thing on Android phones. Nowadays, if you want to control electronics with your phone, they need to be ready for Google Assistant or Alexa support beforehand. This means that those electronic gadgets need to be “smart” home devices.
SwitchBot is trying to eliminate the need to replace your existing dumb devices with smart ones. Instead, you can control anything that accepts infrared commands with the help of your SwitchBot Universal Remote, much like the SwitchBot Hub 2.
This kind of a tool can be handy for a number of reasons. Let’s say you have younger kids or senior citizens in your home who aren’t very tech savvy. Or maybe you have guests over and you’d like to give them access to your devices without doing a new voice match on your Google Assistant. A jack-of-all remote that has all your home device controls preloaded into it is much easier to use for people who fall into these categories.
Setting up the SwitchBot Universal Remote is really quick and easy. A key prerequisite is that you need to have a SwitchBot hub if you want smart assistant connectivity, which basically means that you need it if you want to use the remote properly. And if you want Matter connectivity, you need to have the SwitchBot Hub 2 specifically, not the first-gen Hub or Hub Mini.
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You can load presets of IR controls from the app, automatically map them, or add them physically to your SwitchBot app and create a virtual remote for your electronics. Once you have added these virtual remotes to your SwitchBot hub and connected your smart assistant(s) of choice, you can go ahead and import those virtual remotes to your SwitchBot Universal Remote.
The Universal Remote has regular old buttons like volume controls, play and pause buttons, and more, as well as a touch navigation ring. There’s an interesting red “S” button that lets you switch between your virtual remotes from within the SwitchBot Universal Remote’s interface. It has a tiny display which helps you pick virtual remotes loaded onto it.
You don’t have to worry about changing the batteries on your SwitchBot Universal Remote as it supports USB-C charging and has a 2,000mAh battery. A single charge should last you about 150 days.
SwitchBot gives you the ability to create scenes and launch them directly from the Universal Remote. You can set smart home automations in motion literally with the click of a button.
Matter connectivity is cool to have, but it can be finicky to set up and use as I found during my testing. Google Assistant and Alexa work just fine, but you can’t use them directly with the remote which is such a missed opportunity. The SwitchBot Universal Remote doesn’t have a mic, so you need to rely on your smart speaker or phone for hands-free controls.
The SwitchBot Universal Remote supports around 80,000 devices including air conditioners, fans, lights, TV boxes, DVD players, streamers, projectors, air purifiers, robot vacuums, etcetera. Naturally, pairing with SwitchBot’s own smart home devices such as smart plugs, smart bots, and smart curtain bots is even more seamless.
As for the remote itself, it can manage 25 devices (including 10 IR remotes and 15 Bluetooth communication SwitchBot devices) and 10 SwitchBot scenes at one time. You will have to replace select devices or scenes if you hit this limit.
I didn’t question the need for a tool like the SwitchBot Universal Remote. What I did wonder about, however, was why users need to use a SwitchBot hub along with the Universal Remote. See, the SwitchBot Universal Remote is not very useful without a hub, and all of the brands smart hubs have the IR remote functionality anyway.
So if I did get a smart hub from SwitchBot, why would I go out of my way to buy the Universal Remote? If it had a mic, you’d have one very good reason because none of the SwitchBot hubs have one onboard. But it doesn’t have a microphone, so it’s very hard to build a case for the Universal Remote while a SwitchBot Hub, Hub 2, or Hub Mini exists.
If you are interested in getting a physical remote for all your household gadgets, the SwitchBot Universal Remote is a cool way to control, manage, and access it all. However, it might not add much in terms of practical usefulness, besides physical buttons.
