From The Verge: Smart home company Ecobee appears ready to release two new smart thermostats — the Ecobee Enhanced and the Ecobee Premium — ZatzNotFunny reports. The Enhanced model has appeared in a post on Reddit, while the Premium has leaked via a retail listing from Canadian Tire. Between them, they look set to overhaul Ecobee’s existing lineup of thermostats consisting of 2016’s Ecobee3 Lite and 2019’s Ecobee SmartThermostat with voice control.
The Ecobee Premium appears set to replace the flagship $250 SmartThermostat. It still has a built-in microphone with support for voice assistants like Alexa and Siri, ZatzNotFunny reports, but new for this model is air quality monitoring. One product photo shows the Ecobee app recommending a window be opened to improve ventilation. The thermostat’s user interface also seems to have been updated to remove visual clutter and make key information, like the current temperature, larger on screen.
It’s less clear what improvements are on the way for the Ecobee Enhanced thermostat, which appears to be a replacement for the $180 Ecobee3 Lite. From the image posted to Reddit, it seems to benefit from the same redesigned interface as the Premium, but there’s less information about functional differences. In early December Dave Zatz reported that the new model was in development.
There’s no word on when we might see either thermostat released. But the fact that Ecobee’s flagship SmartThermostat is currently listed as out of stock on its website suggests we might see a successor sooner rather than later. A representative from Ecobee did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
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