Ultraloq Bolt Mission Is the First UWB Smart Lock

The Ultraloq Bolt Mission smart lock unlocks automatically when you approach it with an Android phone, with support for hands-free unlocking via an iPhone coming in 2025.

The Bolt Mission will be available to order later this year, but no firm timeframe was given and the price has yet to be disclosed. Aside from UWB, this smart deadbolt leverages other wireless technologies, including Wi-Fi. There’s also built-in NFC, a proximity technology that allows contactless cards to communicate with a payment terminal. Digital car keys also use NFC. If your Android smartphone has NFC, you can unlock your Bolt Mission simply by tapping. The Bolt Mission also provides a keypad for PIN access and uses a traditional key as a fallback method. Eight AA batteries power UWB, NFC, and Wi-Fi for up to one year.

The Bolt Mission relies on Matter, a connectivity standard allowing smart home appliances from different manufacturers to work together across different smart home platforms. For example, Matter allows the Bolt Mission to integrate with Amazon Alexa, Google Home, and SmartThings for remote access and control.

U-tec, the company behind the Bolt Mission, claims this is the first smart lock to incorporate UWB radio technology. UWB enables spatial awareness to measure distances with high resolution and accuracy. It’s what the iPhone leverages for the Precision Finding feature in the Find My app that pinpoints the location of your misplaced AirTag with an onscreen arrow. The Bolt Mission leverages both UWB and NFC “to determine their exact position relative to the lock, ensuring that only authorized users within a close range can unlock it.”

Thanks to Matter, you can add this smart lock to Apple’s Home app to use in your scenes and automations. However, the Bolt Mission doesn’t work with Apple’s tap-to-unlock Home Key feature, even though UWB has been available on the iPhone since the iPhone 11. Support for UWB unlocking via Home Keys will arrive in early 2025 as part of the new Aliro smart access standard. The current Home Key supports tap-to-unlock via NFC, but an update will enable hands-free unlocking without ever taking your iPhone out of your pocket.

There haven’t been any UWB smart locks so far. Perhaps the Bolt Mission’s arrival will motivate its competitors, such as Aqara, August, Level, Lockly, SwitchBot, and Yale, that UWB technology is worth investing in, especially as it’s a much better solution for high-precision proximity and discovery than Bluetooth and GPS, which are unreliable and slow.

Source: U-tec