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Amazon is in the middle of a week of smart-home deals, offline in a pop-up at Westfield, Shepherd's Bush in London and online, too, natch. The official name is Amazon Alexa's Home of Imagination, but we're not quite sure what to do with that, so we'll go with 'Smart-Home Sale'. The whole thing ends on Monday 28 October, with daily deals popping up and some offers lasting longer.
However, keep in mind that huge Black Friday sales are due soon on Amazon and various other retailers, expected to start in mid-November and run for a few weeks. So any deals you see now on Alexa-compatible products may well be bested next month as the most worthwhile deals tend to be saved for Prime Day and Black Friday slots.
In any case, there's some decent discounts on connected, voice-controllable kit that we'd genuinely recommend considering. If you've been meaning to get going on a smart home, this is a good place to start.
It's Prime Day 2023, so we've uncovered the top discounts. Check out the best Prime Day deals in the UK here.
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What is it? A reliable choice for kitting out your home with smart security cameras, Arlo's cams are wire-free and weatherproof with night vision and a rolling free allowance of seven days' cloud storage for recordings.
How much are you saving? Technically £310 as the original RRP on a three-pack for the first-gen Arlo system is £680. You can find this package selling for anywhere between £400 and £600 elsewhere, which makes it less of a great deal, but the Amazon price is still the lowest you can pick a system up for right now.
Get the Arlo Pro 3 camera kit for £370 on Amazon
What is it? Our go-to smart plugs are TP-Link's Kasa HS100. They're reliable, affordable anyway and they work with everything including Alexa, Google Assistant and IFTTT for remote control when you're out of the house and handy scheduling.
How much are you saving? Just a cool £9 on the three-pack but, hey, when you're fitting smart plugs around the place to fill in your connectivity gaps, every little helps.
Get the TP-Link Smart Plug Wifi Outlet 3 Pack for £36 on Amazon
What is it? This is a great-value set of a smart thermostat (which works with both Alexa and Google Assistant), two smart radiator add-ons for room-level controls and an Echo Dot thrown in for good measure.
How much are you saving? It's a smidge over £45 off the £228.74 price for the bundle and the sale price of £185 makes it one of the most affordable ways to get into connected heating.
Get the Drayton Wiser smart thermostat for £185 on Amazon
What is it? One of our recommendations for the best tablets for kids, the Fire HD 8 Kids Edition hits that sweet spot between a big enough screen and value for money. Ten hours of battery life, 32GB of storage and a year's subscription to Amazon's children-friendly content platform are also included.
How much are you saving? Amazon tends to discount its own products very regularly throughout the year so this is by means and blink-and-you'll-miss-it sort of deal. The regular price for the 8-inch kids tablet is £130, though, so 23 per cent off can't hurt.
Get the Fire HD 8 Kids Edition for £100 on Amazon
Also consider
£15 off Philips Hue Lightstrips starter pack: Philips' slightly more creative, intermediate smart lighting is down from £70 to £55 in the smart-home sale, a 21 per cent saving.
Amazon's Echo Dot is down to £35 from £50: Again, the entry-level smart speaker is on sale intermittently throughout the year. So this price will probably pop up again in November and December. Still, it's a cheap and nifty way into the Alexa voice ecosystem.
And its new Echo Dot with clock is already down to £45: Same as above but this time with added LED matrix for displaying the time, temperature or timers for £10 more. Down from £60.
UE's Blast Bluetooth speaker is down to £70: One of UE's reliably good Bluetooth speakers is on deal this week, down from an initial price of £170, though in the real world this is more of a quick and dirty £20 discount.
Mr Beams spotlight is 40 per cent off: The (now Amazon/Ring owned) Mr Beams does a nice line in garden lighting including these weatherproof, 300-lumen spotlights with motion sensing, now a touch over £23 each.
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
