Birdi smart smoke detector likely to ruffle feathers at Nest HQ

In case you're in need of a replacement smoke detector and haven't settled upon the Nest Protect already, a new smart safety device has just swooped in to knock the Protect off its perch.

With 33 days left of its Indiegogo campaign, the Birdi smoke detector is almost halfway to reaching its $50,000 (£30,570) target. Like the Nest Protect, it is also a carbon monoxide detector and automatically alerts you and/or the emergency services through a smartphone app in case of an emergency.

Unlike the Protect, however, it also does a whole bunch of other stuff that involves measuring various elements of the air to let you monitor the quality of the gas you might be breathing in within your home. One particularly nice touch is that when the battery for your Birdi is running low, the company will send you spares automatically to your door.

That said, it is arguably not as attractive or distinctive as the Nest Protect, even though it comes in six colours. Tony Fadell and his team seem really do have the magic touch when it comes to turning boring household mainstays into objects of desire. Birdi doesn't offer the gentle pulsing light of the Nest Protect as you switch off the lights at night or walk underneath it, and neither does it link up in the app with a (growing) ecosystem of other smart knobs and switches.
In theory Birdi's many different functions seems like a great idea, but perhaps it misses a simple point that Nest really gets -- that objects like clever smoke detectors should be designed to be appreciated passively rather than actively. The Nest Protect performs a job that almost all of us will never need it for, and sits pretty in the meantime -- an aesthetically pleasing and reassuring presence.
Birdi, meanwhile seems geared towards encouraging you to constantly monitor things like air quality, temperature, pollen count and humidity. It's even integrated with social media, presumably allowing you to share facts about the air quality in your home, which will be just as thrilling for your friends as hearing that you've completed a 12-mile run using some app to keep a track of your progress.
No doubt there will be those who want to take advantage of all Birdi's various monitoring functions, but then again, it might be the case that the early bird catches the worm, and that bird in this case was Nest.

If you're interested in backing Birdi and getting your hands on a unit, you can head over to Kickstarter where the current price for i unit is $100 (£61.21). It's set to rise to $119 (£72.76) when it launches properly, stillundercutting the Nest Protect by $10 in the US.