Smart home giant Hive has released a new home hub, the Hive Hub 360 and this time it’s actually good looking. Or at least, it’s supposed to be.
We’ve not seen it in the flesh yet, but from the images released, it has a glossy plastic look. It’s designed to sit in the same visual family as Hive’s beautifully designed Hive View camera.
The View was a collaboration between Yves Béhar and British Gas-owned Hive. In fact, it was the second collaboration, with the original Hive Thermostat also being designed by the Swiss designer.
- Best smart thermostat: heating your home using tech
Bringing chic to the smart home
The Hive Hub however wasn’t designed by Béhar, rather ‘is in keeping with the Hive View style’. We're fans of the Hive View’s styling, thinking that it’s one of the few security cameras on the market that actually looks like it could match some high-end interior design, thanks to its curved steel arm, unlike the uniform white plastic look that most cameras have.
Hive has applied this stroke of design to the Hub 360, too, which replaces the nondescript white plastic box that was the original Hub. And looking across the industry, that is fairly standard for home hubs. The Wink 2 and Samsung SmartThings hub are both white plastic boxes.
Hive’s offering to the smart home hub market is a little less all-inclusive than the others mentioned above, in that it only unifies the products in the Hive ecosystem, namely the Thermostat, View camera, Plugs, and Sensors.
It does have one other trick up its sleeve though, in that it’s also a sound monitoring device. Working much like a security camera, it will notify you when it hears a sound, and records it to your Hive cloud so you can listen back to it.
To match the Hive View, the Hub 360 comes in White and Champagne Gold or Black and Brushed Copper, and costs $139 (£99).
- Want to know what we think of the current Hive ecosytem? Check out: Hive Active Heating 2 review
