Apple’s HomeView has finally arrived and whilst it isn’t a new idea by any stretch, in typical Apple fashion it just feels like the entire package is a notch above any other smart display that I’ve used.
Setting up HomeView is super easy in typical Apple fashion. You just have to bring your iPhone near the device, put your camera towards the screen and it’ll then pull in all of your settings and apps from your iPhone. You just have to do a simple face scan using the in-built camera and say a few phrases for Siri and then you’re good to go with minutes.
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Pulling HomeView out of the box, it was a lot smaller than expected in a good way. It won’t take up much room on your bench, and it looks super high-end to the point that it will look great in any space.
There’s a 7-inch retina display that looks like a larger Apple Watch, and it’s super bright and vibrant and just like any other Apple display, it looks super accurate colour-wise and everything pops on it. You’ve got an ambient light sensor to auto adjust brightness with it able to go into a dark mode and then fully off as it gets dark at night making it suitable for spaces where you sleep.
The touch-screen is extremely responsive, and if you’ve used any other Apple product, it’s really intuitive to use with swiping up taking your to your apps, pulling down from the top right will give you your control center, pulling down will activate Siri and swiping left to right will take you between your faces which again are very reminiscent of Apple Watch faces with everything from photos, to a smart home view to Snoopy being present.
There’s a lot of cool stuff happening here with the default view changing as it detects movement with the in-built camera and it being super easy to add widgets to the locked view or your home screen. There’s a few little oddities where you’ll add a widget and it won’t be available on HomeView but i think that’ll be ironed out.
It won’t be surprising but the speakers in HomeView are fantastic with it able to get super loud whilst maintaining great clarity and a really surprising amount of bass too, and if you’ve got HomePods or other AirPlay devices you can easily add them into the mix too.
As far as app support goes, you’ve got Safari which you can use to fully browse the web with easy to access buttons that turn on Reader mode or the ability to read out a webpage for you, and there’s even a clever option where if you load a recipe on your phone and handoff to HomeView, it’ll load the recipe in a super easy to digest format complete with a recipe list.
There’s Apple Music, Nintendo Music and YouTube Music which all worked as you’d expect, Podcasts app which pulls everything across, your typical Reminders, Calendar and Timer apps and even Messages if you want to reply to people on the fly. I think the mix of apps are right in the sense that it’s everything you’d want to use without whipping out your phone, and everything comes across in real time from your device too in a way that only Apple could do.
There’s also a built-in 12MP camera with Center Stage that is used for FaceTiming (which I can really see me using the device to do), but it’s also used to identify you for personal information between accounts, automatically recognising who’s at HomeView before displaying messages or other personal information, and I think Apple has done this in a really smart way that I haven’t seen on other Apple devices before.
Controlling smart home devices is super easy as well, with all of my devices being pulled in from my home including my front door lock, all of my lights and a camera too.
There’s also the new Siri experience which is a lot more useful than it was when it first launched. I still did have a few little hitches where it’d revert to a downloading Siri state, but again, I think this is a little quirk that will be ironed out.
What Apple has done with HomeView is really impressive, and It’s a much more capable device than I was expecting. It looks fantastic and had all the functionality I was wanting out of something that lives on my bench and how much use you’re going to get out of it ultimately comes down to your use cases and what you’re doing in your home.
