Since the early start i’ve been using homey. And since day one with ups and many many downs. Now almost 4 years later it’s finally somewhat stable. I’m therefor very very very dissappointed that after all the difficult years and hard work from within this community Athom decides to update the hardware to better fit it’s new firmware. In short term the kick starters homey will be rendered worthless. Firmware 2.x will for sure only focus on the new hardware. A shame. It feels like " thank you for the testing and developement, now pay us €400.- so you can test it further. Otherwise don’t bother is anymore." I had hoped that my €400,- kickstart entry would have resulted in more than a table lamp.
I’ll be waiting until my homey finally stops. Meanwhile checking other brands to never return to Athom again. Very dissappointed…
There’s not much “new” to the “new hardware”: same SoC, same radios, same amount of memory. The Homey Pro is a limited edition, so that won’t be the focus of Athom’s efforts going forward.
Then why a new Homey ? Just to remove the NFC and Mic?
" Zowel Homey (Early 2019) als Homey Pro hebben een hardware-update ontvangen. In vergelijking met eerdere herzieningen hebben we besloten om NFC en de microfoons te verwijderen "
NFC was barely used, by omitting it there’s one radio-sender less so it might improve stability. As for the mic, Athom announced quite a while ago they would be dropping support for its own speech-recognition. When Athom started, speech in general wasn’t as evolved as it is now. Back then there was hope they could keep up with google et.al. Turned out they couldn’t. Why then physically remove the mic, that’s a mystery for me too (cost will be minimal I guess). Maybe to prevent drama’s like:
one company gets blamed for removing a mic and the other for having one without telling.