Flic Duo Review

Design and Features

• Tiny, smart design
• Works with almost any smart home system
• Two buttons and gestures offer hidden depths

The Flic Duo is a great bit of design – it may sound odd, but it’s exactly the size it should be. Just like a standard Flic button you can stick it anywhere around the house, where it unobtrusively adds a bit of accessible smart home magic.

In fact, the Duo offers a lot of abracadabra, because it supports just about any system you can name, from obvious contenders like Alexa, IFTTT, Smart Things and Matter, through to IKEA, LIFX, VLC and almost everything else. I say almost, because there’s a glaring omission. Google doesn’t allow external triggers onto Google Home, so there’s nothing a Flic can do for you there.

While a Flic Button simply sticks on the wall, the Duo attaches via a magnetic mount, so you can either leave it be, or have it nearby as a kind of remote. There’s more to this than you might realise – liberated from its wall mount the Duo supports gestures, opening up a much wider range of possibilities.

You could look at the Flic Duo as simply a twin version of a standard Flic Button, and in some ways that’s a strength. While the Flic Twist is more complex than it looks – so much so that nobody else in my family took to it – the Duo is immediate and simple. Stick it on the wall, assign commands to each button, and everyone can use it to do day-to-day things like open blinds, or trigger a smart lighting scene. With press, double press and hold features on each button, this ‘simple’ arrangement supports up to six smart triggers.

Things get fruitier once you undock the Flic Duo from the wall. Now, if you want them to, the same button actions can have different results. As an example, you might use the docked Flic Duo to control lights in the dining area, and the undocked Duo to control the ones in the lounge. In this way you can double up the supported routines to 12.

The Flic Duo isn’t done yet, because onboard accelerometers let you swipe it left, right, up and down. Along with a hold and twist gesture, each of these are triggered in combination with a button, giving you a further 10 possible triggers. That brings the total – from two buttons – to an astonishing 22 possible actions.

Configuration

• Fairly easy to connect
• Huge range of possibilities

Unlike the Flic Twist, you can use the Flic Duo directly with a Bluetooth device such as your phone. You could, for example, pair it with the alarm clock or camera to take photos or silence alarms, or even set it up to trigger the flashlight. You’ll get more out of it if you join it to a hub, but even then you’ll use Bluetooth and your phone to link and configure everything to your liking. Once that’s done your phone’s no longer needed – you’ll only need the app to make changes.

It’s simple to connect a Flic hub, and extremely so to join the Flic Duo to it, but it can get a little complex when assigning actions to results. As an example, to trigger a complex routine you may need to define it across multiple smart ecosystems, such as your lighting or sound systems. Then it may be easiest to link those routines in a third system such as Alexa, link your desired Flic Duo action to Alexa, then finally go into Alexa to join the dots between the trigger and the scene.

Things are a bit more straightforward in other systems such as Matter; once you’ve added a Matter device to the Flic ecosystem you’ll see it appear as a destination for your chosen trigger.

One feature – or a possible complication depending on your outlook – is that you can assign multiple actions to any given trigger. For example, a single push on the big button can turn off a big light and start a film playing on VLC. It’s almost ridiculous how configurable everything is.

One of the joys of the Flic Duo is that once you’ve set it up, everything feels intuitive. I configured mine to run a choice of four lighting scenes when mounted on the wall, but to act as a remote control for Spotify when held in my hand. Configuring gesture control for next/previous tracks, and a toggle for play/pause used up just three of the available triggers, but after a couple of goes they felt natural. Adding up/down gestures to raise and lower the lights fitted in nicely.

It’s rare that the devices I test raise a smile, but there’s an alchemy to how the Flic Duo detects whether you’re holding it or not – I think it’s based on accelerometer input, but it feels almost magically clever.

If you’re paying attention you might realise I only used nine of the available triggers. It’s debatable whether anyone would really need a single controller capable of 22 actions, but I quickly got to know the ones I chose and felt comfortable with them. Importantly, my partner and kids actually used the lighting controls – the Flic Duo is simple enough not to be offputting to casual users.

Performance

• Strong Bluetooth connection
• Works almost instantly

My Flic Hub Mini is shoved in the under-stairs cupboard, where it’s powered by a spare USB port on the router. Even so, the Flic Duo had no problem connecting to it through a concrete suspended floor that often defeats radio signals. Regardless of system, I couldn’t detect any significant delay between triggering an action and it being performed. Lights faded, tracks skipped, and switches switched almost immediately – even complex scenes happened on cue.

I tested the Flic Duo over a couple of months, and in that time it never failed to respond. Given the number of interacting systems, it all feels remarkably reliable.

Should you buy it?