Hands-on: IKEA's simple smart home tech rocks, but Google Home holds it back [Gallery]

IKEA took to CES for the first time ever this year in an effort to show off its new smart home tech, which continues to get better and better, but there’s one big asterisk for Google Home users based on early user impressions.

Late last year, IKEA announcednew smart home products that connect over Matter. They’re very affordable, starting at just $8, and IKEA toutsthat they support various smart home apps.

In person, they work super well, even with the truly awful network conditions that come with a trade show the size of CES. Connected lights respond quickly and the buttons and scroll wheels of the “BILRESA” remotes feel great in to use.

But there’s a bit of a hiccup in the Google Home ecosystem. As some of our commenters mentioned, as well as some on Reddit have found, Google Home doesn’t properly support some of these generic devices just yet, the buttons in particular. They’ll connect, but Home doesn’t know what to do with them.

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Hopefully this will be fixed over time, but for now, these will still work in IKEA’s app as well as some other smart home apps. Other smart home products from IKEA should work perfectly fine in Google Home, though, such as the smart plug and door/window sensor, as well as IKEA’s lighting products. IKEA is adding smarts to some of its most popular lights, too, with the “VARMBLIXT” light – which sort of looks like a donut – adding Matter support for brightness controls and colors too.

Audio has been another big part of IKEA’s push into the smart home. There are some existing Bluetooth speakers that offer neat designs and speaker-to-speaker pairing for groups, as well as the new “KALLSUP” speaker that is launching soon and costs just $10.

The battery-powered cube speaker, like IKEA’s higher-end options, connects your phone via Bluetooth and then can pair to other speakers to form a chain. This is done through a direct wireless connection, instead of something like Auracast. There are limitations to that, such as making IKEA’s product incompatible with other brands, but also benefits such as making the connection seamless. It takes just a few seconds to connect speakers to each other.

The sound quality isn’t anything impressive, but it’s quite good for a $10 speaker.

The IKEA “KALLSUP” speaker launches in April in the US alongside the “VARMBLIXT” lights. IKEA’s Matter products are now widely available in the US, with “SOLSKYDD” speakers also available now.

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