Matter Standard: Revolutionizing Smart Home Connectivity
Panasonic has introduced its latest range of air conditioners (AC) for the year 2024, featuring its lineup of Matter-enabled room ACs. Matter stands as a groundbreaking universal standard for connectivity in smart home appliances, ensuring seamless interoperability across various brand-agnostic mobile apps. With this release, Panasonic emerges as the pioneer brand in India to introduce ACs adhering to this innovative protocol. The Japanese manufacturer unveils a total of 60 models, among which include the Matter-enabled ACs spanning 1.0-ton, 1.5-ton, and 2.0-ton variants.
Fumiyasu Fujimori, Managing Director of PMIN at Panasonic Life Solutions India, expressed, “The new line-up of ACs, comprising of India’s first Matter-enabled RACs will not only provide inter-operability but is simple to use, reliable and secure. By seamlessly connecting with other Matter-certified devices and platforms, they will facilitate a smarter and more efficient use of energy, optimizing comfort while minimizing environmental impact.”
The Matter-enabled ACs are seamlessly integrated with Panasonic’s Miraie app, which adopts the same connectivity standard, ensuring convenient control and management. Users can also leverage any other Matter-enabled app to regulate the appliance effortlessly. These cutting-edge models are now available across prominent offline outlets, leading e-commerce platforms, and through the company’s official website.
What is Matter, the universal standard of connectivity for smart home appliances
In recent years, a big focus in the consumer tech space has been on interoperability and unified solutions. Last year, Xiaomi launched its HyperOS, which replaced the MIUI system to bring a single interface to connect and unify all its IoT devices. On the hardware side, Apple finally ditched the Lightning port in the iPhone 15 series in favour of the USB Type-C port to comply with the European Union’s new rules of bringing a unified port for all consumer electronic devices.
Matter is a similar protocol for software unification and connectivity of smart home and IoT appliances. The universal standard was brought up by the Connectivity Standards Alliance (formerly known as Zigbee Alliance), a group of more than 500 companies. The first time this protocol made the headlines was in 2019 when Apple, Google, and Amazon joined hands with Zigbee Alliance to create a single unified connectivity system for smart homes.
It solves a core issue for smart home owners, which is managing multiple apps to control the various smart appliances in the house. The situation has become similar to the late 90s and early 2000s when users were forced to keep multiple remote controls to use their appliances till universal remotes came about. Matter aims to mirror a similar solution through a networking protocol to connect compatible devices and systems regardless of their brand, model, or origin of manufacturing.