Google’s Nest Labs is resuming sales and lowering the price of a high-tech smoke detector that was pulled from the market after malfunctioning.
The new price for the detector, called “Nest Protect,” is $99 when sales resumed late Monday following a two-month moratorium. That’s a 23 percent discount from the alarm’s original price of $129 when Nest released it last fall.
Nest designed the device so an alarm warning of smoke could be turned off with a wave of the hand after a user determined there was no danger. But other kinds of hand gestures also could turn off the alarm, raising the specter that the device might remain silent when a fire broke out.
The defect prompted Nest to halt sales of the detector in early April. Back in May, a U.S. government notice revealed Nest Labs is recalling 440,000 smoke detectors, which was the first public revelation of how many of the smart home appliances have shipped since sales started in November.
Nest, which Google acquired earlier this year for $3.2 billion, shipped 440,000 of its smoke alarms in the United States between Nov. 15 and April, according to figures contained in a notice by the Consumer Product Safety Commission. The notice said the recall affected roughly 440,000 units of the $130 Nest Protect sold in the United States at retailers and on the Nest website between Nov. 15 and April 3.
Carl Purvis, a spokesman with the Consumer Product Safety Commission, said the number of units cited in the recall referred to the full production run, including products sold to consumers as well as products shipped to retailers.
Source: NDTV
