Eufy Safety—Anker’s sub-brand spanning nearly the whole lot from video doorbells and safety cameras to child screens—has now moved into the world of good locks, hitting the market with a svelte piece of that’s loaded with options. And most of them work properly.
The Bluetooth-only lock presents a fairly interesting design, decked out totally in black. Adopting the now-standard upright rectangle design, Eufy retains the chassis skinny each inside and out of doors your door, the place the escutcheons jut out from the floor solely about 1.5 inches and 1 inch respectively.
This evaluation is a part of TechHive’s protection of the most effective good locks, the place you will discover evaluations of competing merchandise, plus a purchaser’s information to the options it is best to think about when procuring.
Set up hiccups
Set up is printed in an in depth, printed handbook, and the numbered bins contained in the equipment assist novices preserve monitor of what’s what. The entire affair goes collectively merely and historically: You bolt the outside escutcheon to an inside mounting plate, after which join that to the inside escutcheon. 4 AA batteries energy the unit, and Eufy says they need to final a full 12 months.
Christopher Null / IDGYou simply drag down from the middle of the display to open the lock utilizing Eufy’s app.
You’ll want the Eufy Safety app—not the EufyLife or EufyHome apps, that are reserved for different Eufy good house gear—to configure the lock. Sadly, the app wasn’t working after I first tried to put in the lock; it wouldn’t even let me arrange a username and password. After some troubleshooting, the corporate mentioned it was a brief server drawback on its finish.
The following day, the app choked once more throughout setup, a bit additional alongside. As soon as once more, the corporate blamed a server error. Since I used to be testing the lock just a few days earlier than its official launch, it’s tempting to chalk this as much as beta pains, however because the app (and Eufy’s servers) have been round since not less than 2018, the multiple-day hiccup feels alarming.
After the server points had been resolved, I had no different actual issues with setup apart from a buggy calibration course of that wouldn’t flip the deadbolt in any respect. Rigorously loosening a few of the bolts—a standard repair—bought issues shifting, although Eufy’s motor sounds prefer it struggles greater than most when working the lock.
Ecosystem limitations
Once more, the lock is Bluetooth solely, so it doesn’t actually combine with different good house gear (outdoors of something you may already be utilizing inside the Eufy Safety app), together with voice assistants. Apple HomeKit assist can also be not within the playing cards. Along with utilizing the app to function the lock, you additionally get three further strategies of gaining entry: numeric keypad, bodily key, and fingerprint reader.
Christopher Null / IDGThe app shops a strong and detailed log of when the door was unlocked and by whom.
Eufy’s app is pretty easy, making it simple to function the lock on demand, arrange entry for extra customers, and see a historical past of who’s come and gone. The settings menu presents a big depth of additional choices, together with a lock-out system that limits the lock’s usability when unsuitable PINs or unregistered fingerprints are scanned and a scrambling system that enables customers to enter dummy digits earlier than or after their PIN as an additional safety measure (decreasing the probability of a prison deducing the true PIN by scrutinizing which numbers have fingerprints on them).
Auto-locking can mechanically lock the door after as much as three minutes and might even be set to function solely throughout particular hours. One of many lock’s killer options is an built-in gyroscope and geomagnetic sensor that may decide whether or not the door is ajar—with out requiring a typical, exterior magnetic sensor—permitting it to lock the door mechanically when it’s closed.
A flaky fingerprint reader
All these options labored properly in my testing, with one exception: The fingerprint reader is decidedly erratic. Whereas it’s simple to register prints, it felt nearly random as as to if the lock would truly learn my print after I tried to scan it and unlock the door. Very cautious placement of my thumb or finger improved my success charge, however a few of the time the lock would simply refuse to determine my print it doesn’t matter what I did.
I by no means discovered a lot of a sample in any of this. One second the print wouldn’t scan, the following it could work high quality, though it undoubtedly labored finest with thumbs vs. smaller fingers. If you happen to use the automated lock-out characteristic, this will create an actual drawback. And curiously, whereas the system helps as much as 100 customers, it will possibly retailer solely 50 fingerprints.
One other helpful characteristic is the inclusion of a microUSB port on the underside of the outside escutcheon. This can be utilized to quickly energy the lock from every other USB-connected system, in lieu of the extra typical 9-volt terminal, if its inner AA batteries die. Arguably, it’s simpler as we speak to scare up a microUSB cable than it’s a 9-volt battery; then once more, you may at all times preserve a bodily key as your emergency entry technique, too. Eufy’s key mechanism is a high-security sort that’s rather more tough to select or copy.
Backside line
At $249, The Eufy Good Lock Contact is aggressive in worth with different fingerprint-reading locks, however the secret sauce of any lock is its means to work completely each time—or not less than near it. Because it stands, Eufy’s lock is nice sufficient to move muster, however it must work a bit higher earlier than incomes a robust advice.
Be aware: Whenever you buy one thing after clicking hyperlinks in our articles, we might earn a small fee. Learn our affiliate hyperlink coverage for extra particulars.
______________________________________________________________________________________________
Get your CompTIA A+, Network+ White Hat-Hacker, Certified Web Intelligence Analyst and more starting at $35 a month. Click here for more details.
Source link
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
