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Ikea’s cheap smart blinds could finally make the perfect lazy Sunday morning complete

Ikea’s cheap smart blinds could finally make the perfect lazy Sunday morning complete

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At a surprisingly low price (for smart blinds)

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Image: Ikea

Ikea is known for its low-cost furniture, but over the past few months, the company has been expanding into a new market: inexpensive, decent-quality smart home gadgets, including connected lights and outlets. Now, if Ikea product pages are to be believed, the company is moving into the next area of the smart home: cheap, internet-controlled smart shades, via Zatz Not Funny.

Aggressively low pricing for smart blinds

To start, Ikea is launching two models of smart blinds: the Kadrilj, a set of regular gray blinds that start at 99 euros (around $113) for the smallest size, and the Fyrtur, which are blackout shades that start at 119 euros (around $136). That’s aggressively low pricing, considering that most smart blind systems tend to start somewhere in the range of $300 to $500.

Ikea is taking a simple approach to the smart shades: instead of wiring them into your house, the shades have a removable, rechargeable battery pack. An included remote will let you raise and lower the shades.

The new shades will be compatible with Ikea’s Tradfri smart lights and smart plugs, and they will work with the same app. Even more usefully, you’ll also be able to control the shades with Alexa, HomeKit, and Google Assistant. That means that my lazy Sunday morning could finally be complete. Soon, I’ll be able to wake up, raise my shades to let in that lovely morning sun, listen to some music, read a book, and still not have to get out of bed.

Ikea is also leveraging the fact that it’s been making curtains for years and that plenty of people already own them, so the new smart blinds will work with Ikea’s existing Vidga series of curtain rails, meaning you should be able to swap them in for your current boring curtains without too much trouble.

The new blinds are set to launch on February 2nd in Germany based on the leaked product pages. While there’s no word yet for broader release, odds are they’ll hit other countries sometime in the coming weeks as well.