The 9 best smart home gadgets of 2017 (so far)

Yes, your blue basket’s already filled to overflowing with bargains, but make sure you don’t leave Ikea without a couple of these smart lights.

The Trådfri range starts at just £15 for a bulb dimming kit, but we’d suggest picking up the Gateway hub – that’s because from summer or early autumn 2017, the Tradfri team will start working Google Assistant, Amazon Alexa and Apple HomeKit.

This means being able to talk to your lights and set scenes for different rooms, just like Philips Hue. The Trådfri lights might only do ‘white spectrum’ rather than full colour, but in every other way they’re a match for Philips Hue, and a bit cheaper if you start adding lots of bulbs.

Plus you can always pretend you’re going to Ikea to get that replacement curtain rail.

Read our Ikea Tradfri review

Once you’ve set up a home security cam, it’s hard to imagine life without the satisfaction of ‘checking in’ to make sure everything’s in order.

Owners of gardens and sheds full of meticulously ordered power tools will want an all-seeing outdoor cam too, and the Arlo Pro is the best we’ve seen so far. It’s weatherproof and properly wireless, thanks to its rechargeable battery, and has night vision too for catching sneaky badgers or other nighttime visitors.

The only thing it doesn’t do is spray salad cream at intruders, but who knows what’s possible with its IFTTT connectivity.

Read our Netgear Arlo Pro review

Poor burglars will have to retrain for a different career if this is where security cams are headed. The Cam IQ is a 4K indoor security cam with ‘Supersight’, which uses its generous resolution to zoom in and follow your burglar around like he’s starring in a slapstick comedy.

You can also use the Cam IQ as a kind of family tracker thanks to ‘familiar face alerts’, which give you alerts about the comings and goings in your house.

It’s not cheap, with the latter feature only coming with the £80 per year Nest Aware subscription, but this is by far the most future-proofed security cam you can buy.

Read our Nest Cam IQ hands-on review

Voice assistants are handy when your hands are covered in cake mixture, but we’re still always going to want the satisfaction of pressing real buttons.

Logitech’s programmable Pops want to be those buttons, letting you control your smart home without having to say “Hey, Alexa” three times because the radio’s on.

Because they’re compatible with IFTTT and, recently, Apple HomeKit, you can get seriously creative with your recipes too – for example, creating a ‘Netflix’ button that sets the mood lighting and turns on your TV.

We’re fans of Flic’s smaller buttons too, which are finally getting a hub from October 2017 that’ll let you you control them without your phone being present. But if you don’t want to wait for that, the Pops are a satisfyingly squidgy addition to any smart home.

Read more about Logitech Pop

Don’t worry, this doesn’t make your toast sentient or give it built-in Alexa. Instead, Sage’s intelligent toaster comes with a couple of very handy features for fans of browned bread.

There’s a button for ‘a bit more’, which gives your toast an extra thirty seconds of heat, and another for ‘a quick look’, which lifts it up for a quick progress check.

Okay, it’s stretches the word ‘smart’ a little, but we’ll take a moderately bright toaster over one whose erratic timings effectively make it like entering a toast lottery.

Read our Sage Smart Toast review