I bought the $24 kit from Home Depot on Sunday. So far I like it. The GE bulb color is more 'orange' than I would like but its fine.
Setup was breeze and the Wink app works great with the product. I have the two included bulbs setup on schedules and so far they have been flawless. I ordered two more bulbs.
I believe I can ONLY run bulbs on the included mini-hub but that's OK for now. I read a lot of negative press about the $50 Wink hub so I'm hesitant to switch to something that may work from something that does work.
Whats the average 'must haves' for this new tech? I used to play around with X10 automation so Im happy to see the new advances. Appears to be far more robust.
Home Depot has sales where you can get the Wink hub cheap or free if you buy X number of accessories. The technology is cool and Wink is improving, but it can still be pretty frustrating. The biggest missing pieces IMO are:
1. Lack of timers. Let's say you have a motion sensor and it detects motion and turns on a light. I would love to be able to say "Turn off the lights in 5 minutes if no additional motion is detected." You can't do that now or at least, can't do it easily.
2. Lack of local command caching/execution. Wink needs access to the internet in order to control everything. If your internet connection goes down, you can't control anything from your app. They really need to add some form of local control so devices can still be controlled from your LAN in the event the internet connection goes down. This is definitely possible, as some hackers/devs have shown it working.
My advice is that if you go with Wink, make it a policy to only buy devices which can be used on Wink AND other competitors such as SmartThings. That way, if the SmartThings v2 hub is as good as rumors suggest, you can pick one up and easily use your existing devices.