Two years ago, Yale and Nest teased a sleek-looking smart lock with a touchscreen, no key, and tight integration with the Nest smart thermostat. We got radio silence on the project for two years, but at CES 2018, we’ve finally got a release date for the Nest x Yale.
It’s going up for preorder starting in February, and will ship in March. We still don’t have any idea about price or where it’s going to be available, but we’ll take what news we can get for now.
The basic details of the lock haven’t changed at all in the last two years. It’s still a keypad-based system, with a touchscreen on the front, and no option to use a key, unlike the popular August smart locks. Yale claims that the lack of physical key, combined with “reinforced hardware” on the outside and “bank-level encryption” on the software side make it more secure than a conventional lock.
The system is battery-powered, and if you ignore enough alerts, you could theoretically get locked out. That’s why Yale has provided a way to unlock a dead lock from the outside, using a 9V battery to enter a code into terminals on the bottom of the lock.
Nest as a company has changed since 2015, when the lock was first announced, and so have the integrations. The Yale lock communicates with all of Nest’s systems, so you can pair it with a Nest Hello doorcam to let visitors into your house remotely, or pair it with the Nest Secure alarm so that the alarm de-activates when you enter your code.
