Back in May, IKEA teased an overhauled smart home hub with Matter support for cross-platform connectivity, plus a brand-new app for an improved experience with its smart home products. Now early listings for the DIRIGERA have popped up giving us a look at the price, release date, and more.
Here’s how IKEA describes the upcoming Matter-ready smart home hub:
“The next step on the journey to enable a better everyday life for the many people and a smarter living is to launch the Matter ready hub for smart products DIRIGERA. With its new software, DIRIGERA is built to handle more product segments and onboard more products than the existing TRÅDFRI gateway. It also enables the new and more user-friendly IKEA Home smart app.”
DIRIGERA price and release date
Back in May, IKEA said it was aiming for an October release. Now live listings for DIRIGERA have been spotted in a few countries by Tech Gaming Report via The Verge.
On IKEA’s German site, DIRIGERA is listed for 59.99€ (currently converts to $58.86). That’s a roughly 2x jump over the previous-gen $30 TRÅDFRI. The Norwegian site says availability will start in November but no specific date is listed.
Apple HomeKit and Matter support
As a refresher, Matter is a collaboration between Apple, Amazon, Google, Samsung, the Connectivity Standards Alliance, and many other companies including IKEA. It has seen multiple delays with the latest launch planned for this fall. With IKEA slating for a November DIRIGERA launch, hopefully, we’ll see a slew of supported devices from all the participating companies.
Matter’s goal is to make it seamless for customers to know a smart home device will work with their setup (cross-platform including HomeKit) and also make them faster, more reliable, secure, and easy to use.
One of the underlying technologies Matter is using to enable that is Thread. We’ve already seen a number of smart device companies adopt Thread like Apple with HomePod mini, Belkin, Nanoleaf, Eve, and more.
IKEA’s DIRIGERA hub features WiFi, Zigbee, and Thread radios for connectivity. Pictures on IKEA’s listing also show off the back of the hub with its USB-C and Ethernet port. Another image shows a generic look at the new DIRIGERA app with a colored-block UI.
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