Photo: Giktime
As a technology reporter, I get to test dozens of products a year in a variety of fields: from the newest smartphones, televisions, laptops and cars for hundreds of thousands of shekels. But in the absolute majority of cases, I say goodbye to them at the end of the review and move on with my life, and rarely do I feel the lack of this or that gadget. But once in a few years this gadget comes along, which makes me ask “where have you been all this time”. Such is the following product.
The Austrian company Nuki, founded by two Austrian brothers, has been developing and marketing smart locks for 8 years, and its 3rd and newest generation is currently being sold in Israel. Now, after many months of experimenting with it, I can tell you with full confidence: I have no idea why you don’t have one yet.
Installation is just as easy as the previous generation, purchasing is much easier than the previous generation
If somehow you haven’t come across the name yet, Nuki is an Austrian company that has become one of the most prominent players in the smart lock market in recent years. We tested the previous version of Nokia, which for almost 3 years gained a very good reputation, and after testing it we understood exactly why.
Unlike all kinds of locking systems that the installers of your alarm and security cameras will be happy to recommend to you and charge a little more payments and installation fees for, you can definitely install the Nuki 3 yourself. It is put on top of the butterfly that sits in the interior of your house and with which you usually lock and open your door and… that’s it. The kit I received came with 2 metal plates that should fit the depth of the cylinder and the thickness of the rosette around it. Let’s put it this way, the most complicated part for me in the installation was being able to disassemble my existing rosette to put the lock on it. From the moment I was able to find the correct allen key, and loosen the single screw that was at an almost impossible angle in my annoying door, it took me another 3 minutes to complete the entire installation. Assuming you don’t run into any real problems disassembling your Rosetta, you’ll be done with the entire installation in 5 minutes, including running the app.
The kit I tested includes the Nuki Smart Lock 3.0 Pro as well as the Nuki encoder. The Pro part is pretty much what makes the 3rd generation of Nokia one that becomes much more relevant to more people.
Photo: Giktime
The Nuki 3 Pro comes in both white and black, so firstly it fits more types of doors in terms of design, and it already comes in the box with a rechargeable battery pack (2,500mAh) via USB-C, so you don’t have to burn 4 AA batteries every time. but simply to charge. But more important than anything else: the Pro version comes with a built-in Wi-Fi module, which means you won’t need the somewhat clumsy bridge of previous Noki releases that takes up a permanent power point just to connect to the remote lock. Why do you need Wi-Fi for a device that you already reach within Bluetooth reception distance? Well, if for example you are one of those people who, as they leave the car, they wonder if they remembered to lock the door. I say for a friend, yes?
All the technical improvements of the Nuki 3 Pro make this purchase much simpler and clearer, and one that does not necessarily require you to add more expensive products to the cart. For comparison, if you had to complete all these accessories for the previous generation, for example, you would have to pay NIS 300 for the battery pack and NIS 490 for the jumper, or buy a lock and jumper combo kit for NIS 1,550. The Nuki 3 Pro comes with all these built-in at a recommended price of NIS 1,369 and often less than that in sales. This is a much more attractive deal. While not a cheap or easy deal, definitely with more value compared to what you could get just last year.
A simple and convenient app, but the coder is the trick
After installation, you can change almost any setting you want, to any scenario you want, and all through the excellent Noki app. We already wrote about it in the previous generation, but Nokia’s application is an example of how to develop an application for a smart home product. Excellently designed with a clean and clear UI/UX interface, updated and above all includes many options – without confusing you. Do you need a certain number of turns to open your annoying lock? You can set as many degrees as you only need. Do you want the door tab to stay open a few more seconds every time you open the door with the lock? You can up to 30 seconds. Do you want the door to lock automatically after each entry? You can set up to a range of 30 minutes. Do you want your partner to stop asking you if you remembered to lock? You can set automatic locking at a certain time (a feature that is already worth the full price of the lock for me).
For me, Nokia’s app passes my parents’ test, which means that it is intuitive enough so that even users who are not early adopters and with a lot of patience can understand and use it. It’s so simple, that when I asked my parents to drop by my house to check that our cat had food and water when I was abroad, I simply sent them a link, that as soon as they open it with the app (no need to register), they can open the door. Common: You can issue links and access codes to your door that will be limited in time, so you can send, for example, to your professionals or cleaners a personal code that only works when they are supposed to arrive, and the rest of the time, this code will not work. It’s smart, it’s easy and it Employee.
When you love a coder more than an app
If we have already touched on Koden, for me at least, the Nokia experience is incomplete without it. Instead of having to open your smartphone every time and get to the app, or even be afraid that the door will slam while you go out to throw away the garbage without your smartphone on you – the coder allows you to enter without any additional means of identification except for a 6-digit code (no more, no less). From the long months I’ve been living with it – it works great, and it’s very convenient to operate. Did you go for a run? You don’t have to take your smartphone with you. Did you momentarily forget something at home after getting into the car? You don’t even need to take the smartphone out of the carrier. This coder just makes it easier to use, leaving the app mostly to manage the lock.
In all the long months I’ve been testing it, only once did I get to the point where I type the code into the coder and try to open the lock in the app, and it just doesn’t do it – which led me to use the key again like some peasant for the first time. This was apparently due to a connectivity problem of the lock itself, when only after I disconnected and connected the batteries to it did it return to working on Bluetooth and WiFi. In addition, one fundamental problem with regular use of Coden lies in the fact that you do not see Nokia’s notifications regarding its battery status. So, one fine day I found myself leaving the house, closing the door and saying to myself “I’ll be fine without a key, right?” – And what do you know? When I got home, I found that the battery had just died after the automatic lock, and so I found myself waiting for my wife to come back to open the door for me like she was in elementary school again.
I think that if the coder had illuminated a red light after the Noki reached, for example, 30% battery, or if the Noki itself had a small speaker that could make a light noise at a reasonable time, or if the application had sent me some kind of notification – I would not have reached this situation. But this is something that if you plan to use Nokia mainly through the coder – you need to know. In general, the Noki lights up in red when it needs charging, but precisely as a product that you simply put on and forget about its existence (in a perfectly good way), it needs another clear notification mechanism to prevent such cases. Another downside is that it doesn’t have lighting, so you won’t be able to see the keys when you type your code.
The battery pack that comes with the Noki in the Pro version supports USB-C as requested, but for an unknown reason, Noki unfortunately chose not to support PD standards for fast charging. This not only means that charging takes hours instead of minutes or an hour like it takes for your smartphone these days, it also means that there is a good chance that you will not be able to connect your cable and charger to charge these batteries, and you will have to use the outdated USB cable that comes with the kit, and you should not lose him. This is a corner that usually all kinds of Chinese (and sometimes Israeli) gadgets really like to corner, and it’s not something I expect to see in a premium product.
USB-C, but the imperfect kind. Photo: Giktime
Benuki claims that the batteries are enough for about 2 to 6 months of use before they need charging, depending on the nature of your use, of course. But at least from my tests, I had to charge the batteries once every 20 days, which is light years away from the company’s promise. Benuki claims that this is probably due to a problem with the batteries or excessive effort in locking the door. Hope your experience will be better in this case. Noki asked to replace the batteries I have with a new case – after I check it I will update the review. In any case, I can tell you that Yaniv, who tested the previous generation of the Nokia with a rechargeable battery pack, reported then that its usage times are significantly longer and reach two months – quite likely.
You can also open the door without doing anything
Noki has a pretty cool feature called Auto Unlock, which can not only bypass the coder but also the app itself: when you approach your home to a defined area that you control, the smartphone and the lock can go into step mode, and as soon as you are physically close enough to the door and a Bluetooth connection is established Between the two, the lock will simply open by itself without you even having to touch your smartphone or the door.
When this feature works well, it feels like a kind of technological magic. I came back several times with shopping bags in my hands, and instead of putting everything in one hand or putting the bags down just to look for my key or smartphone, the door just opened and I walked in. It’s really wonderful. The problem is that many times this feature misses a bit: for example, I received a notification that the door of the house was opened when I entered the parking lot with the car, which is a bit problematic when there is a rather curious kitten at home. There have also been quite a few cases where I got to the door, and I stood in front of it like an idiot and waited for it to open, only to start entering the code into the coder, and then hear the door open while I was on the last digit. Again, when it works – it works, but in the end, I preferred to turn it off and use mostly the encoder. If you don’t have naughty children or cats and dogs that would be happy to jump on one open door for a few misses of the function, it is excellent.
The second generation of Nuki Yaniv defined well as “unlocked for traitors” because of the noise that its opening and locking produces. So Benuki claims that the 3rd generation of the lock is quieter than its predecessor, but what can I tell you? Don’t know if it’s my door, the acoustics in the room or the lock itself, but it’s still pretty loud. I set the lock to automatically lock 20 minutes after it was opened, and when guests were sitting in the living room or kitchen when the lock went into operation, they would always be alarmed and think someone was trying to open the door. That means even the 3rd generation of Nokia is still not a lock for cheaters. The noise is understandable, after all, there is a motor here that needs to turn a key with variable resistance, but if the company invests a little more in better acoustic insulation for the central box that contains the mechanism – I believe it will be able to achieve a more reasonable noise level by tens of percent.
I would be happy if the Nuki 3 came in the box with some kind of magnetic sensor that would indicate whether the door is physically open or closed, instead of having to buy a separate sensor for the door for almost NIS 200, to make sure that the door was not accidentally left open. This is a problem that is sometimes double, and not only because you are afraid that someone will enter your home or leave the door without you knowing, but because once the lock does not know whether the door is physically open or closed, mechanisms such as Auto Unlock and Auto Lock may cause the cylinder to lock while the door is open . This means that if you try to close it after the cylinder has already turned, you are going to knock it hard against the frame, and this may already cause damage to the mechanism of the door. It seems to me that the nook is already sophisticated enough, and the company is serious enough, to integrate everything as the lock itself. But hey, I guess I should keep a few tricks up my sleeve for Nuki 4.0.
Add to your Black Friday shopping list
Photo: Giktime
In all the months that the nook was in my house, both my wife and I just got completely used to living with it: you don’t really have to pull out keys every time you get home and find the key from my school-server bundle; You no longer need to be afraid of a door slamming unexpectedly; If we didn’t give someone a key and he needs to enter the house, you can simply give him a code in the background; No more asking at one in the morning “Did you lock the door?” because he was locked alone; All these matters simply disappear from your mind, and anything that relieves me of worries or tasks – that’s great.
Although it is a pleasure that does not fit every pocket, but in long-term use, the Nokia 3 Pro is one of those products that, after you buy, you don’t know how you got along before it. It makes your life easier instead of requiring you to do unnecessary work, its application supports more or less every scenario, every voice assistant and every possible interface, and it is simply an excellent product. One that I can easily recommend to more or less everyone, and I can’t say that about every product.
The Nuki 3 smart lock is imported to Israel by the official importer and sold in electrical and electronics networks in Israel