A cheap Android tablet makes a better smart display than any dedicated hub I've tried: Here's why

I've been on the smart display bandwagon ever since the category was introduced.

From the Google Nest Hub to the Amazon Echo Show, I've bought and experimented with the entire array of options, and none of them have been particularly useful for me.

Invariably, I'd end up ignoring them within a month or so.

But a while back, I grabbed a cheap Android tablet, stuck it on the wall, and turns out that's all I needed to solve every problem I was hoping to solve with a smart display.

I would say that it's a better smart display than any dedicated hub that I've tried. Here's why.

5 smart display tricks that quietly changed how I live

Smart display tricks you'll love

Posts 2
By  Sanuj Bhatia

My smart home display shows exactly what I need

Local access, custom dashboards, and no vendor lock-in

The problem with every major smart display, be it the Echo Show or the Nest Hub, is that they are built around locking you into an ecosystem.

Yes, they can control your smart home, but these companies aren't really building an all-encompassing system for your home.

The goal here is to nudge you into their own ecosystems, and that's fine, but it's not for me.

The other big issue is customization or the lack of it. You get whatever interface the manufacturer ships.

The updates are also on their schedule, and when the company decides to stop supporting the hardware, that's also on their schedule, and there's precedent for it.

Google discontinued the Nest Hub Max's software updates, whereas Amazon killed its Echo Show lineup features without warning.

When you buy a dedicated smart hub display, you're basically trusting that a corporation will keep caring about that product for the long run. I'd expect all that as well if the performance was great.

In practice, when you open the browser on the Echo Show to load something like a YouTube video or a Google Calendar, it opens as if it were running hardware from a decade ago.

You're basically getting the performance of a low-end smartphone at a premium price tag. It's just not worth it.

So, a while back, I picked up a budget Android tablet and decided to turn it into my smart home display.

I installed Fully Kiosk Browser, and pointed it to my Home Assistant dashboard, locked it into kiosk mode, and mounted it on the wall near my front door. This entire setup took just under 20 minutes.

In return, I have a 10-inch display that shows exactly what I want or need. These could be lights, climate data, or security cameras and door sensors.

There is no upsell from a third-party manufacturer and no subscription needed, but more importantly, you can tweak the interface to look and feel exactly the way that you want.

A large part of that is also Home Assistant's flexibility. You can use the interface editor or pre-existing themes to skin the device to look exactly how you want.

This starts with color schemes and icons, but also stretches to what cards you place on the desktop.

It's infinitely more flexible than anything from Google or Amazon.

When clubbed with Fully Kiosk Browser, you can use the motion detection trigger to automatically switch on the display and then have it turn off when you walk away from the display. Very cool!

Elsewhere, you can have camera feeds on your home page or one of the other pages, and you're no longer restricted to using a specific kind of camera.

Since you're using Home Assistant, it can tap into thousands of camera types and manufacturers and integrate a mix-and-match of feeds directly into your setup. There is no lag and no restrictions here.

Plus, everything works locally, so even if the internet is down, you can still access your smart home, which is not something that I can say for Google or Amazon's ecosystems. Not reliably anyway.

Building a smart home tablet is easier than you think

Home Assistant has become surprisingly beginner-friendly

Now you might be thinking you need technical chops to pull this off, but the answer is no.

On one hand, setting up Home Assistant has become very simple, with clear onboarding that helps you integrate all your devices into the ecosystem.

You can do this from your computer, then point a fully kiosk browser on the tablet to a specific URL, and it'll continue right from there.

Even if you do not want that, you can still build a smart home tablet using a pure Android setup, using a combination of widgets that go on your home screen and direct shortcuts for your favorite smart home apps.

This could be something like the Hue app to control your lights or the SwitchBot apps to control your smart blinds. You are not restricted here at all.

Moreover, if you care about aesthetics, that too is taken care of by going the Android tablet route.

I 3D printed a mount for my tablet with space to route the charging cable, but it could be as simple as using 3M tape to mount your tablet to a wall and running a cable on the side.

All this and more at a price that is pretty competitive with a smart hub while giving you more flexibility. In case you already have a tablet lying around that's not being used, the setup is basically free.

Why I replaced my smart home hub with a tablet

I'm not saying that there is no place for a dedicated smart home hub.

If you want an absolutely fuss-free experience for basic controls, it will do just fine.

If you want a system where you have full control over how your interface looks and want extended functionality, including the ability to pull your tablet off its mount and use it like a regular tablet, that's not something that most smart home hubs offer.

After you've used a tablet as a smart display that actually shows what you want it to show, it's hard to go back to one that's just trying to upsell you into an ecosystem.

Google Nest Hub 2nd Generation

Display
7-inch LCD, 1024x600
Colors
Chalk, Charcoal, Mist, Sand
Connectivity
Wi-Fi 5, Bluetooth 5.0, Matter, Thread
Price
$99
Dimensions
4.7 x 7 x 2.9 inches
Weight
19.7 oz

The second iteration of the Google Nest Hub is a simple and reasonably affordable smart display that does a good job of controlling smart home devices via the Google Assistant. By far, its most interesting feature is the radar-based Soli technology. Google has been looking for a way to implement its novel radar technology into smart devices for a while now, and the Nest Hub 2 sees the first successful such attempt in the form of sleep tracking. Unlike wearables, which many people have issues using while asleep, the Nest Hub's radar tracks a single user's sleep with surprising accuracy. Its data doesn't quite have the intricacies of some wearable sleep trackers, but the overall results are basically on a par with premium choices like the Fitbit Charge 5 and Apple Watch. As far as its clock functionality goes, it's loud enough to wake up pretty much anybody, and the voice control is simple and effective. In fact, Google's latest smart display utilizes machine learning to keep your most common commands at the ready, which decreases waiting time and streamlines your experience. However, outside of controlling Google-compatible smart devices and serving as an alarm clock, it falls short in some areas. For example, it's not very good at playing music (although it does podcasts well), and there's no camera, so it can't make video calls. If you're looking for a capable smart display that supports sunrise alarms and doesn't cost a fortune, though, it's a great choice.

$100 at Google Store
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