While the IoT is already a well-known phenomenon in the tech world, the specifics of IoT implementations are sometimes less than obvious. Here’s a quick-and-dirty overview of the wildly diverse and still evolving landscape of the IoT devices themselves, divided for your reading pleasure into the consumer and enterprise realms.

Consumer IoT devices

The consumer side of the IoT is mostly about inserting Internet connectivity into objects that a person born before 1990 wouldn’t really have thought needed it – from the toaster and refrigerator in your kitchen, to the locks on your doors, to your car and your wristwatch.

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Smart home IoT devices are, arguably, the biggest deal on the consumer side of things – some people really like the idea of being able to control their lights, door locks and so on from their smartphones. Smart lightbulbs, locks and their ilk are big business, according to Statista, which estimated the total revenue from their sales at nearly $12 billion in 2018. The devices themselves have a wide range of sophistication – a smartlock could be as simple as a device with a servo to move the bolt and an Internet connection to a smartphone app, or as complicated as a full-on access control system, complete with temporary virtual keys that guests can use and logging to track access into and out of a dwelling.

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