Susie Ochs writing for TechHive:
Now the company that invented the Round thermostat back in 1953 is back with a new line of smart home devices called Lyric. And first up is, you guessed it, a smart thermostat. It looks familiar—which is to say, beautiful—but it takes a different approach to saving you money than the Nest. Instead of trying to learn your patterns over time, the Lyric thermostat doesn’t worry about patterns. Instead, it uses your phone’s geolocation features to start conserving energy as soon as you leave your house.
The Lyric’s reliance on geofencing to manage my home’s temperature doesn’t do much for us. I work from home and my wife is a stay-at-home mom. There is almost always someone at our house. So I’m not super interested in a thermostat that uses my iPhone’s geofencing to adjust the temperature.
However, the Lyric has another smart feature as well:
The Fine Tune feature is pretty smart too. You know how sometimes the weather forecast has two temperatures: the real air temperature, and whatever it actually “feels” like, adjusted for the wind chill or the heat index? The Lyric is programmed to make those same adjustments inside your house. Fine Tune factors not just the indoor temperature, but also what it’s like outside, and the humidity (the Lyric houses its own humidity sensor), so it can make adjustments like running your system’s fans more or bumping the temperature up or down a degree.
Here in Kansas City we like to joke that if you don’t like the current weather, just wait 10 minutes. Having a thermostat that takes humidity and outside temperature into consideration for making auto-adjustments to the internal temperature could prove to be really convenient for our Kansas City home.
Also, the Lyric has a curious change of roles in that its display shows you the current weather and the short-term forecast, and then you have to use the accompanying iPhone app to actually program the thermostat.
All this to say, after reading TechHive’s review and The Verge’s, the Lyric sounds pretty great. It’ll be interesting to see how some of the real-world reviews rate it over the coming months.