Flying cars and self-propelling space suits may still be some way off but, on balance, The Jetsons ‘ view of the smart home has proved to be more science fact that science fiction.

We live in an age of Roomba robotic vaccum cleaners, iWatches and Skype but I’d hazard a guess that many of us don’t yet live in a house that addresses us by name when we cross the threshold, closes the curtains automatically at sunset or fires up the central heating at the optimal time to make things suitably toasty when we return home at the end of the day.

Enter the Internet of Things (IoT) — where a whole world of gadgets and gizmos interact with each other to monitor, report and switch things on and off with varying degrees of intelligence with the aim of making our lives simpler, more efficient, nicer and just generally more Jetson.

Some pretty big companies are eyeing up the potential of IoT as it aims to move from the geeky world of competing standards and technologies to more ubiquitous ones and deliver the kind of plug and play niceness that modern consumers expect.

Enter Samsung. At the start of the year CEO BK Moon pledged that 90% of the company’s impressive array of electronic devices will be able to connect to the web by 2017, with complete connectivity expected by 2020.

In this context then, shelling out a massive $200 million to acquire Silicon Valley startup SmartThings seems like a smart move — no pun intended — an ideal way to kickstart a play for the hub that controls the connected home and potentially steal a march on Apple, Google and whoever else sees the potential spoils.

The reimagined SmartThings was unveiled at IFA in Berlin earlier this year and finally launched in the UK back in September. In the interests of full disclosure, I was invited to trial and comment on the system by Samsung for six weeks shortly after launch (as part of the #thinksmartthings campaign) and what follows are my thoughts from my own brain not paid-for product placement filled with marketing-waffle.

Living the SmartLife

I’m sitting in my home office. The postman arrives at the front door with the latest batch of utility bills. How do I know? My phone’s just played “You’ve got mail” as the smart sensor attached to my letterbox has been triggered by a stack of envelopes falling to the floor. The movement’s been picked up by the hub attached to my router and that communication, in turn, triggered the update to my iPhone. Walking to pick up the unwelcome delivery a motion sensor switches on a lamp attached to a smart outlet so I can see my way and switches it off again as I leave the hallway. No trailing wires and fairly simple to set up. Smart, eh? Useful?, erm kind of.

The Samsung SmartThings hub is what lies at the centre of my new connected universe. It plugs in to a Wi-Fi-enabled router and then ‘talks’ to a whole range of devices that are ‘paired’ to it. As the hub supports Z-Wave and ZigBee standards (with Bluetooth promised soon) you’re not limited to Samsung’s proprietary devices and can therefore tap into a whole raft of products ranging from Bose speakers to Yale locks and Honeywell heating controls — providing Samsung, the device manufacturer or the SmartThings community can code up the integration. The idea being you’ll only need this one hub, and a single connected app (available in Android, iOS or Windows flavours) to control your entire smart home and not a multitude of hubs and apps.

The Samsung SmartThings Starter Kit — a world of connected opportunities

For many people the SmartThings Starter Kit (£199) is likely to be the gateway to the SmartThings universe, offering the hub and a range of devices in one smartly-packaged promise of a utopian (or at least more closely monitored and automated) future. For your cash you get a hub, a multi-sensor, motion sensor, presence sensor key fob and power outlet…

The hub is the brains of the operation — a beige box that connects to your wifi and keeps an ear out for communication from your smart devices and sends alerts across the interwebs. Fairly non-descript, bar a small green light to show it’s working, this is really designed to be hidden out of sight. If your internet goes down then the battery back-up does its best to keep some functionality (smart lighting for now, the home monitoring stuff soon) ticking over.

As for those devices…

The multi-sensor is an open-close sensor ideal for attaching to a door or window. Want to know when the front door opens or someone raids the fridge? This is the gizmo that makes it possible. The motion-sensor is on the lookout for movement (as you’d expect) and temperature (as you might not), the presence detector is a small keyfob that can trigger events when in proximity to your home and the outlet can be hooked up to anything from a lamp to a stereo to a slow cooker. Those sensors are all pretty small and can work for up to a year from a couple of small power cell batteries.

Underpinning the system is the idea that one input can trigger a series of actions. So a motion sensor in your room can be triggered to turn on a lamp, switch the power on to the TV and send an e-mail to your wife saying you’re home, for example. There’s an active IFTTT (If That, Then This) community and an engaged developer base aimed at bringing these possibilities to life and then applying them in your own home or an extensive set of controls that will let you develop your own scenarios, all accessed via a smartphone app.

Getting smart

Getting up and running is reasonably straightforward — with the hub connected to power and a network point, it’s a matter of downloading the Samsung SmartThings app and detecting devices to be paired. This should happen automatically but I had to move many in very close proximity of the hub and/or push the ‘pair’ button to get everything to ‘see’ everything else and the app doesn’t make this very easy.

That smartphone app needs to do a lot — it’s your gateway to adding SmartThings sensors and third-party devices, and configuring the rules and triggers that will form the beating heart of your connected home. Whether viewing options by device or room it seemed way too easy to get lost or find that particular setting you actually needed, making what should be a journey of discovery a little more stop-start than it should be.

On the positive side, with no trailing wires (bar the ones from the router and power socket to the hub) this is a system that can be taken with you if you move and your devices can easily be put to new uses as your needs change without too much hassle.

It’s the flexibility of the system that is both a major selling point and a major drawback. On the plus side the opportunities it offers are almost limitless but it is precisely this fact that makes it difficult to describe what it’s actually for. No surprise then that Samsung have engaged an army of testers to share their thoughts and experiments via social media as part of their UK launch plans.

The main problem, bar that fiddly smartphone app, is that to make a home truly smart requires lots and lots of devices and, individually, SmartThings sensors look expensive. You’re looking at £30 to £50 a pop so you have to be pretty sold on the benefits that each device can bring to your daily routine to shell out the cash. The starter kit goes some way towards establishing a smart ecosystem for a reasonable initial outlay but if you want to switch a table lamp on independently from a stereo system you’re going to need another smart outlet. Security may be the most obvious practical application but to kit out all your windows and rooms with sensors would likely increase costs beyond a more standard alarm system and, though less smart, that may well be a better choice for many.

So, after a month on test, would I recommend the system? Absolutely. To those looking to jump onboard the smart home bandwagon the system works well and plays nicely with anything you’re likely to need it to… at least for now.

This is an industry in flux — new standards may or may not play so nicely with Smartthings, and there’s always the danger that Apple or Google (who’ve both got ambition and form when it comes to IoT) could launch a killer application or implementation that leaves Samsung wanting. Plus, while consumers may drive this revolution so far it’s going to take housebuilders to really take to the idea of smarthomes ‘out of the box’. Whether they’ll choose to eat up their margins to embed smart switches, lights and sockets or even opt for Samsung’s view of the smart world at all remains to be seen.

All that said, for a boy raised on episodes of The Jetsons and Tomorrow’s World, I can’t help but wonder what the first inhabitants of my house (who got their keys back in 1860) would make of a talking letterbox and lights that come on by ‘magic’, all for under £200. Pretty smart stuff, don’t you think?

Find out more about Samsung SmartThings on the Samsung SmartThings website.