Flic Duo review: Smart home control with a ‘flic’ of your wrist

Price When Reviewed

$59.00. Reviewed with $30 Flic Hub Mini; price as reviewed: $89.00

Best Prices Today: Flic Duo

Flic’s good button is a tiny system with a strong idea, a platform-agnostic gadget that actually provides you a button that may be positioned anyplace for simple, tactile management of all varieties of good house gadgets.

The all-new Flic Duo, reviewed right here, builds significantly on what that unique gadget can do, transferring from three capabilities to a whopping 22. It’s a major growth of capabilities, though getting every thing arrange throughout the Flic ecosystem stays an endeavor that good house novices may discover difficult.

Specifications

Like the unique Flic Button, the Flic Duo is so small it’d simply be misplaced—and even consumed by an rambunctious pet. Measuring 2 x 1.25 inches general–and roughly 1/3 of an inch thick–it’s designed for use within the hand or mounted to the wall—or each. A magnetic again means you may slap it onto a steel backing plate (bought individually, $10) or affix it to any steel floor for a semi-permanent setup whereas additionally permitting you to take away it as wanted.

As the identify suggests, the Duo has two buttons as a substitute of 1, billed merely as “Big Button” and “Small Button” respectively. As with the usual Flic Button, you may assign duties to every of those buttons with single-push, double-push, or push-and-hold triggers. Unique to this new mannequin are hold-and-swipe and hold-and-twist triggers, each of which I’ll get to in a bit.

The Bluetooth-enabled Flic Duo will work with or and not using a Flic Hub (both the essential, single-band-Wi-Fi Hub Mini, $30; or the dual-band-Wi-Fi Hub LR, which provides infrared blaster and ethernet ports, and Apple Home assist. It prices $90.) But the Flic Duo is much less succesful in the event you select as a substitute to pair it on to your telephone.

A phone-centric strategy isn’t splendid, because it makes the Flic Duo ineffective in case your telephone isn’t in Bluetooth vary; and a few options, together with the twist perform, don’t work in any respect and not using a hub. Either Flic Hub will do the grunt work of pushing the Flic Duo’s instructions to the web or to native good house gadgets as wanted. I examined the Flic Duo with a Hub Mini.

However you select to pair it, the Flic system can management gadgets throughout scads of third-party ecosystems, the main ones being Matter, Alexa, IFTTT, and SmartThings. It also can management Philips Hue, LIFX, Ikea, and Nanoleaf gadgets immediately with out an middleman, and it might work as a distant for Chromecast and Sonos. Integration with Google Home is dealt with by way of Matter or IFTTT. An entire record of integrations will be discovered here.

Installation and setup

Christopher Null/Foundry

Setting up the Flic Duo is pretty painless. Presuming you’re utilizing a Hub, the Flic app will routinely uncover the Hub as soon as it’s plugged in, asking for the password printed on its bottom and configuring fundamental Wi-Fi settings. With the Hub linked, now you can pair it with the Duo, which is an identical, albeit password-free course of.

It’s a fast and straightforward course of; the far more daunting a part of the expertise comes subsequent, when it’s time to arrange your integrations.

Using the Flic Duo

Flic hasn’t modified a lot about the way in which its integration setup system works, and regardless of the promise that “new partners are continuously being added,” I didn’t see a lot of a change from the record out there final yr, though I’ll admit it’s not possible to maintain observe of each single choice of the handfuls out there (together with the “fart generator,” which is now referred to as “fart sound”).

Configuring these integrations hasn’t modified, and the method stays advanced at finest. For instance, to arrange an Alexa integration, it’s essential to add the Flic talent to Alexa, then return to the Flic app and choose the specified set off you need to arrange. Next, it’s again to the Alexa app to create a routine (or use an current one), the place you assign the Flic set off you simply chosen to that routine. Alexa does many of the heavy lifting, and Flic simply serves as a intermediary.

Christopher Null/Foundry

Things like controlling lighting immediately with LIFX or Philips Hue gadgets is extra simple, because the Flic app can uncover the lights you have got arrange in these apps and management them immediately. Still, you must have a powerful grasp on good house fundamentals for this to be intuitive.

The actual benefit of the Flic Duo comes while you benefit from the brand new triggers out there, together with these swipe and twist capabilities I discussed beforehand. With these, you maintain down a button then swipe in one in all 4 instructions; this may be useful for biking by way of music tracks or toggling an on/off state (swipe up for on, down for off, for instance).

The drawback is that Flic’s model of a swipe could be very powerful to drag off efficiently. Rather than simply pushing the button and transferring your thumb in a single path, I discovered you needed to sort of jerk your complete system in that path whereas additionally sliding your thumb throughout it on the identical time.

Christopher Null/Foundry

So, push the button, slide upwards whereas concurrently lifting your wrist, after which let go. Rarely may I carry out this efficiently on a single attempt, typically leaving me maniacally waving the Duo round to attempt to get a command to undergo.

The twist perform is much more attention-grabbing. Here you press a button, then rotate your wrist left or proper. “Twist” might be a misnomer for this movement, however I discovered it labored much more successfully than the swipe perform, with none trial and error in any respect. Twist can be utilized to intuitively management quantity or the brightness of lights, and I discovered it nice for dynamically biking by way of coloration lighting choices on a lamp, too. Unlike the swipe characteristic, twisting labored seamlessly each time I attempted it.

Should you purchase the Flic Duo?

The Flic Duo is the much more highly effective huge brother to the unique Flic Button, and it’s additionally arguably extra helpful (albeit additionally much less intuitive to program and use) than the Flic Twist. It’s not a tool for good house novices, who I count on will shortly develop into misplaced within the advanced machinations required to arrange even fundamental integrations. More superior customers, then again, will probably discover it extremely helpful—even in the event you discover you must construct a cheat sheet to maintain observe of the handfuls of integrations you find yourself creating.

It’s not excellent, in fact: The swipe perform wants plenty of work, stickers to label the Flic buttons nonetheless price additional ($10 pack for the Flic Duo), documentation is principally nonexistent, and sure promised options like a “find my Flic” perform within the app are nonetheless pending for 2026. It’s additionally costly: $59 in comparison with $35 for a single Flic Button.

All that mentioned, in the event you’re keen to speculate slightly time, power, and endurance, there’s nearly no good house atmosphere the place the Flic Duo gained’t be helpful.