O2 Home could make your house smarter

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There's a lot of smart home technology available – from Philips Hue lightbulbs to the Nest Learning Thermostat, but none of it seems to have quite taken off to the same extent as smartphones and other consumer tech.

O2 is seemingly looking to change that though, with its newly launched O2 Home service, which provides everything you need for a basic smart home setup in a single package, and lets you control it all from a single app on your phone.

The packages come with a monthly subscription of £20 or more, but avoid hefty upfront costs, so there's not much barrier for entry. As each package includes multiple smart devices you can make your home smarter all in one go – though there are extra devices that you can add at any time too.

Other than spreading the cost and providing all the basics in one, the main angle of O2 Home seems to be that it will be installed professionally, making a smarter lifestyle accessible to less tech-minded people.

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Take your pick

There are three packages available, with O2 Comfort giving you a tado smart thermostat, two smart plugs, a presence sensor and an O2 Smart Hub, to link everything up, while O2 Home View is focused on security, providing an O2 Smart Hub, a Samsung SmartCam, a wide view camera, one open and one close sensor and a presence sensor.

Those two packages each cost £30 per month, but for £20 you can get O2 Home Connect, which includes an O2 Smart Hub, two presence sensors, two open and close sensors and two smart plugs.

As well as the devices themselves your subscription includes an annual health check of your smart home system and free call outs for any issues that can't be solved over the phone, but when a big aspect of things like smart thermostats is to save you money on your energy use it seems a bit questionable to be paying a hefty monthly subscription for the privilege.

If you fancy giving O2 Home a try it's available from today in the London area, and will be rolling out to the rest of the country in the near future.

• Amazon Echo could soon be making UK homes smarter too

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