Sales Of Nest Protect Resume At Lower Price, Minus Potentially Unsafe Feature
June 17, 2014
The Google-owned Nest Labs has just resumed sales of its popular smoke and carbon monoxide detector, Nest Protect.
Early last April, sales of the device were suspended by Nest. Then, in May, more than 440,000 units of Nest Protect were recalled. Both moves were made on account of a potential safety issue where the Nest Wave, a feature that enabled users to turn off the alarm with a wave of the hand, could be unintentionally activated.
The errant feature has since been disabled in Nest Protect units connected to the Internet via a software update. And it has been removed in new units, which are now available for $99 each, down from the device's previous price of $129.
Nest announced the return of Nest Protect in the market in a blog post, which also highlights some key "real-life data" and a "real-life story" of a thankful Nest Protect user named Lucas Wollermann:
We’re very pleased that Nest Protect is once again available to customers. And now, the price is $99 to make it accessible to as many people as possible. Because we want to see more CO emergencies end up the way Lucas Wollermann’s did.If you can't see the video embedded above, please click here. Following the resumption of the product's sales, Nest has also updated its official iOS companion app, Nest Mobile, with improvements to Nest Protect account pairing, among other tweaks. The app was updated last April to remove the setting for Wave. But sans the Wave feature, Nest Protect now requires users to press a hardware button to turn off the alarm. "That said," Engadget notes, "a Nest spokesperson told us the company is working on an easier way to silence the alarm, even if hand gestures aren't the way to go (people might silence the device when they didn't mean to)." Nest Protect was released by Nest last year as a follow-up to its flagship product, the Nest Learning Thermostat. For more information on Nest Protect, check out our review of the product here on AppAdvice.