Nest Labs earlier this year halted sales of its Nest Protect smoke detector in order to address a possible safety concern. The company determined that the Nest Wave feature could accidentally silence the alarm during a real fire, so it is shipping the product for $99 now instead of $130 with the feature disabled.
The company said the detector, known as Nest Protect, will go back on sale without a feature that prompted the recall in April. That feature, which it calls Nest Wave, was designed to let people temporarily silence the alarm by waving their arms beneath it. In laboratory tests earlier this year, Nest said it had determined that body movements near the detector could be misinterpreted by software in the device, resulting in the unintentional silencing of the alarm.
Nest has still not fixed the glitch. Instead, the company said, it has deactivated the feature in the detectors being returned to store shelves and will reactivate it once it solves the problem. Immediately after it announced the problem in April, Nest remotely deactivated the Wave feature in alarms that were already installed in homes.
For those who already have a Nest Protect smoke detector, the Wave to Silence feature was disabled back in April via a software update, if the unit was connected to the internet. Customers must now disable the Smoke Detector by physically pressing a button.
Nest Labs was founded by the 'father of the iPod' Tony Fadell after he left Apple. The company was later acquired by Google for $3.2 billion in cash.
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The company said the detector, known as Nest Protect, will go back on sale without a feature that prompted the recall in April. That feature, which it calls Nest Wave, was designed to let people temporarily silence the alarm by waving their arms beneath it. In laboratory tests earlier this year, Nest said it had determined that body movements near the detector could be misinterpreted by software in the device, resulting in the unintentional silencing of the alarm.
Nest has still not fixed the glitch. Instead, the company said, it has deactivated the feature in the detectors being returned to store shelves and will reactivate it once it solves the problem. Immediately after it announced the problem in April, Nest remotely deactivated the Wave feature in alarms that were already installed in homes.
For those who already have a Nest Protect smoke detector, the Wave to Silence feature was disabled back in April via a software update, if the unit was connected to the internet. Customers must now disable the Smoke Detector by physically pressing a button.
Nest Labs was founded by the 'father of the iPod' Tony Fadell after he left Apple. The company was later acquired by Google for $3.2 billion in cash.
Read More via NYT