almond+ unboxing… finally.

  • images
  • August 28, 2014

I backed a Kickstarter cam­paign. And it paid off, which is to say that I even­tu­ally received an actual prod­uct in the mail. Here it is, ladies and gen­tle­men: the Almond+ wifi router. (Pics inside.)

On March 8, 2013, I sup­ported a Kickstarter project for a new WiFi router, the Almond+ from Securifi.

On August 27, 2014, it arrived. I was­n’t frus­trated by the delay, mostly because they took all that time in order to update the device’s inter­nal tech. Almond+ features Z-Wave PlusThey added USB 3.0, inte­grated the lat­est (and most future-proof) ver­sion of WiFi, and they also added the lat­est hard­ware for the most pop­u­lar and flex­i­ble spec­i­fi­ca­tions of “smart-home” device man­age­ment  (Zigbee and Z‑Wave, the lat­ter uti­liz­ing the new fifth-gen “Z‑Wave Plus” spec). As far as I’m con­cerned, if you’re going to be late with a prod­uct because you’re mak­ing sure it has the lat­est-and-great­est tech, your cus­tomers should be appre­cia­tive. (As one of those cus­tomers, I much pre­fer this over receiv­ing the prod­uct eight months ago but packed with already-obso­lete hardware.)

As for the Almond+ itself…

I wish I could say it’s awe­some. It’s not… yet. But it could be. Its firmware still needs a lot of work — there are promised fea­tures that sim­ply aren’t func­tional — but that was expected, since I elected to get the thing as an early release. Furthermore, Securifi has been very trans­par­ent with Kickstarter back­ers about what they’re work­ing on, when they expect to have cer­tain fea­tures ready, and in what direc­tions their devel­op­ment team is pointed. (And they’ve shown some will­ing­ness to make adjust­ments to their plans based on feedback.)

All-in-all, the thing has a ton of poten­tial. The fea­tures that are fully oper­a­tional (or close to it) work very well. The 802.11ac WiFi is fast, robust, and has great range, for exam­ple. Also: the visual inter­face, both on the device’s screen and on the web-based man­age­ment tool, is intu­itive, attrac­tive, and highly functional.

I might write up a full review when I’ve had a chance to play some more (and if I have some­thing of value to say about it), but in the mean­time, here are the unbox­ing pics. (Click the thumb­nails for full view.)