I Watched a Security Camera Greet Its Owners and Tell Strangers to Get Lost
Last week I went out to Gillette Stadium in Foxborough for UGREEN's Smart Living Launch Event, and I walked away more impressed by a home security system than I expected to be. I've reviewed a lot of cameras and smart hubs over the years. Most of them do the same handful of tricks — motion alerts, night vision, a cloud subscription you forget to cancel. This one did something I hadn't seen work smoothly in person before: It could tell the difference between the people who live in a house and the people who don't, and it acted accordingly.
UGREEN, the consumer tech company probably best known for cables, chargers, and docking stations, used the event to step into a much bigger category. It's now making a full smart home ecosystem, and the centerpiece is a device called HomeAgent.
The pitch: a security system with actual judgment
UGREEN built HomeAgent around the idea that most home cameras are built to record risk, not to understand a household. Think about how most systems work now — something moves, you get a notification, and you have to squint at a grainy thumbnail to figure out if it's your kid, your dog, or someone you should be worried about. UGREEN flipped that around by giving the system enough local processing power to recognize who's actually supposed to be there.
At the demo, when a family member walked up to the door, the system said "welcome home." When a stranger did the same thing, it gave a clear warning instead. No lag, no confusion, no generic beep. It just knew the difference and responded like it knew the difference.
The other feature that got me was the voice command search. You can ask the system to find your dog, or a specific family member, and it will pull up where they were last seen on camera. As someone who has spent an embarrassing amount of time yelling a dog's name into the backyard at 11 p.m., I can tell you this solves a real problem.
What's actually inside HomeAgent
Some of the UGREEN products I saw at the event. At the top is the HomeAgent and at the bottom are the three new MagFlow chargers.
HomeAgent is built as a local hub, meaning the storage, the computing, and the device control all live in one box in your house rather than scattered across someone else's servers. UGREEN is leaning hard into that local-first angle, and for good reason. Privacy is the number one concern I hear from readers whenever we talk about smart home cameras, and "your footage lives in your house, not a data center" is a much easier sell than "trust us."
A few things HomeAgent is built to do:
Recognize people, pets, vehicles, and packages, and flag anything unusual
Let you talk to the system directly, asking it to check a room, find a family member, or set up a voice alert for something like a package delivery
Store photos, video, and files locally with no monthly fee for the basic storage
Pull highlights from your camera footage and photo library automatically, then display them on a companion digital photo frame called UGREEN Gallery
Coordinate other smart home devices through Matter, so you can build automations across brands instead of being stuck in one company's app
There are two versions, the HA100 and the HA100 Pro, with the Pro built for more demanding AI tasks and faster networking. UGREEN also introduced a bigger, more powerful hub called MasterAgent MA100, which runs on NVIDIA's Jetson Thor chip and is aimed at people who want serious local computing power running their whole smart home setup, not just a camera or two.
Pre-orders for HomeAgent HA100, HA100 Pro, and MasterAgent MA100 opened September 3 through UGREEN's AIoT store, with a $50 deposit locking in a discounted early bird price. UGREEN says the full public launch happens through a Kickstarter campaign starting October 27.
A hometown ambassador
UGREEN also announced New England Patriots cornerback Christian Gonzalez as its new Global Brand Ambassador, which explains why the event was held at Gillette Stadium instead of, say, a hotel ballroom in Boston. UGREEN already partnered with the Patriots as an accessory sponsor earlier this year, so this is really an extension of that relationship rather than a surprise pairing.
Gonzalez talked about preparation and staying composed under pressure, and tied that back to the idea of technology that helps families feel ready and protected. It's the kind of quote you'd expect from an athlete at a product launch, but the framing fits well enough with HomeAgent's whole pitch around being proactive rather than reactive.
UGREEN says it'll set up product experience booths at four Patriots home games this season, plus a citywide watch party across Boston venues in December, so if you're local and curious, you'll get more chances to try this stuff in person.
The charging lineup: MagFlow gets a cooling upgrade
The event wasn't only about security. UGREEN also expanded its MagFlow wireless charging lineup with three new products, and the standout is a genuinely clever engineering fix for a problem anyone who's used a magnetic power bank knows well — the thing gets hot. It’s been over 100 degrees here in my home state of Texas for months, so more heat is NOT welcome.
The MagFlow Pro Magnetic Power Bank 10000mAh is the first liquid-cooled Qi2 25W magnetic power bank on the market. It uses a small internal pump to circulate coolant away from the parts that generate heat, with a little window built into the case so you can actually see the cooling system working. That was a fun feature that I loved watching when the device was attached to my phone.
UGREEN says it can charge an iPhone 17 Pro Max to 50% in 40 minutes while keeping peak temperatures noticeably lower than typical wireless chargers. It's priced at $149.99.
There's also a 3-in-1 charging stand that handles a phone, an Apple Watch, and AirPods at once, using a fan-based cooling system instead of liquid, priced at $159.99. And there's a compact, foldable 2-in-1 charger for $59.99 that folds into a stand and fits in a bag for travel.
None of these charging products are as flashy as a camera that recognizes your kid's face, but they solve a problem plenty of people run into every day.
My take
I go to a lot of these launch events, and most of them announce incremental upgrades dressed up as breakthroughs. This one felt different, mostly because of how the recognition features performed in the room rather than in a slide deck. A security system that knows your family on sight and can help you track down a wandering pet by voice command is the kind of feature that actually gets used, not just advertised.
UGREEN is clearly betting that the next phase of smart home tech isn't about adding more gadgets to your app. It's about making the ones you already have work together and actually understand the household they're protecting. Based on what I saw at Gillette Stadium, that bet looks reasonable. Whether it holds up once these devices are in regular homes instead of a stadium demo booth is the part I'm curious to test next.
