Tristan Perry 
If you are travelling or you bought a cheap Google Mini from abroad, you might be wondering whether you are safe to use your Google Home device in another country. Yes, the Google Mini is dual voltage – it supports input electricity from 100V/120V (depending on model) up to 240V. Therefore you should be fine … Read more
Having a smart voice assistant like the Amazon Echo is great due to all the smart home features it offers, but sometimes it seems to ‘wake up’ by itself and play a random noise or sound. Sometimes this sounds like a genuine notification (even though there’s no reason for the notification), whilst other times the … Read more
Home automation can be achieved in a range of ways. With so much smart tech available nowadays, you can pretty much look around your house and find ways of automation everything you see. But having loads of choice is both a blessing and a curse: it’s easy to never automate anything around your house because … Read more
“Home automation is the future”, they say. But what exactly is ‘home automation’? We might think of a coffee maker that automatically brews your coffee when your alarm goes off, or a light bulb that emits different color light depending on the time of day. Home automation does include these things, of course, but it … Read more
I have posted a new video on YouTube covering how to play free music (with zero ads) on a Google Mini/Google Nest Mini device, which is part of my ‘Does the Google Nest Mini Need a Subscription?‘ article: Video Transcript Hey YouTube, it’s Tristan from Smart Home Point here. I wanted to speak to you … Read more
The Amazon Echo offers over two million songs as part of Amazon Prime, but Google doesn’t have a similar membership scheme. Also the ‘small print’ of the Google Mini and Google Nest Mini says that “subscriptions may be required for certain content”. But what exactly does this mean? If you bought a Mini and don’t … Read more
“My smart thermostat has really improved my home life” – said no one ever. When smart ‘learning’ thermostats burst onto the scene in 2011, they did so to great fanfare. After all, they are smart. They learn. They will massively improve your home life… or so the marketing promised. The reality is a lot more … Read more
History is littered with incorrect predictions of what smart homes of the future would look like. Whether it was the LA Times Magazine predicting in 1988 that we’d all have robot butlers (I wish this had come true!), or Intel scientist Dean Pomerleau predicting in 2009 that we’d soon be controlling computer systems with our … Read more