After months of marketing the new “Protect” fire alarm and its “wave to hush” feature, Google-owned Nest has halted sales of the device following the discovery that users could accidentally disable the technology by waving their arms in front of it.
In a blog post, the company urged users to turn the feature off, which is referred to as the “Nest Wave.”
If there’s a silver lining to this story, it’s that this discovery was made by Nest, not as the result of some unfortunate incident.
Tony Fadell, Nest’s chief executive, wrote, “We identified this problem ourselves and are not aware of any customers who have experienced this, but the fact that it could even potentially happen is extremely important to me and I want to address it immediately.
“We're enormously sorry for the inconvenience caused by this issue.”
The company's blog post added that all users who have Nest Protect connected to the Internet via Wi-Fi will have the feature disabled automatically.
Those interested in restitution for the defunct device will receive refunds, no questions asked.
Fadell wrote that he expects to see the issue resolved in between two and three months.
Story via bbc.com
Learn more about Electronic Products Magazine