Ring Smart Lock is the first lock from Amazon's Ring unit, and its distinguishing feature is a hand-turned dial that restores power after the battery dies. No spare key or backup battery is needed, only a few turns.
Smart locks share one awkward failure: a flat battery leaves the door dead. Ring says its answer is to build the recharge into the lock itself, so a resident who arrives home to a dead unit can turn the dial a few times and get it running again. Founder Jamie Siminoff framed the Ring Smart Lock's dial as ending what he called smart lock anxiety. Ring plans to sell the lock in the U.S. in early 2027, in black, silver and brass, and has not given a price.
With the dial covering power, the Ring Smart Lock drops the physical key altogether. Entry works through a fingerprint reader, a backlit touchscreen keypad, the Ring app or an Alexa voice command. Owners can lock or check the door remotely and grant timed access, such as a dog walker who gets in on Tuesday afternoons and at no other time. Connectivity runs over Amazon Sidewalk, the shared network of nearby Amazon devices, rather than home Wi-Fi, and Ring says unlocking happens on the device itself, so a network hiccup should not keep anyone outside.
That pairing is the sensible part of the design. The dial deals with the battery, and Sidewalk deals with the router, which are the two most common reasons a connected lock stops being useful. Installation is meant to be simple too: the lock fits a standard single-cylinder deadbolt and needs no extra wiring. The Ring Smart Lock plugs into the rest of Ring's range, including doorbells, cameras and alarms, with Echo and Alexa handling voice control and every event landing in the Ring app's activity feed.
Ring announced a new default encryption scheme, TAKE, for its customers alongside the lock. A regulatory caveat applies to the Ring Smart Lock, though. Amazon's own disclosure notes that the lock has not yet received Federal Communications Commission authorization and cannot be sold until it does. How many turns a full recharge takes, and how long a hand-charged lock keeps running, are still unanswered, and they are what will decide whether the dial is a convenience or a real safeguard for someone standing on a doorstep.
