LAS VEGAS – At Pepcom’s Digital Experience event, Kwikset is showing three new smart locks, the Aura Bluetooth lock, and their first Wi-Fi product, the Halo in both touchscreen and button versions. Ali Atash, Senior Product Marketing Manager, briefed us on the highlights of the new products.
Both locks share many features. The Kwikset App is used to control and configure the lock. Of course by using Bluetooth the range at which one can communicate with the Aura with be shorter than that of the Halo, where both the lock and the phone have to be in range of your Wi-Fi.
The benefit of the Halo using Wi-Fi is that you don’t need a smart home hub in order to use it. It also appears that while one can receive notifications of important events automatically with Halo, one has to manually examine logs with the Aura.
The locks both sport a motorized mechanism, the ability to program up to 250 user codes and schedule access. They both sport SmartKey Security, which protects against advanced break-in techniques, and also allows you to quickly re-key the lock if you think the physical key has been compromised.
Aura, intended to the a low-cost entry point into the smart lock space, will be priced at US$149. The Halo button version will be priced at US$199, and the Halo touchscreen version will be priced at US$229 and be available in Q2 2019.