Published: October 7, 2026 · Last updated: October 7, 2026
TL;DR: Amazon’s Ring unveiled its first-ever smart lock today, a $249 device called Ring Smart Lock built around one idea: a hand-turned dial that generates backup power so a dead battery can never lock you out. It ships in Q1 2027. Ring paired the launch with five new cameras, including its first 4K models and a new AI feature meant to help families spot a lost pet on camera.
Ring has sold doorbells and cameras for more than a decade, but it has never built its own lock. Every “Works with Ring” deadbolt on the market came from a partner, Schlage, Yale, Kwikset, while Ring stuck to the stuff with a lens on it. That changed today. Amazon’s smart home division announced the Ring Smart Lock, a $249 standalone deadbolt that marks the company’s first attempt at owning the one smart home category it had always left to someone else.
The pitch isn’t a sleeker design or a faster fingerprint reader. It’s a dial. Every battery-powered smart lock eventually runs its batteries down, and until now that meant one of two bad options: carry a backup key you stopped using the day you installed the lock, or stand on your porch waiting on a spare set of AAs. Ring’s answer is a manual recharge dial built into the lock itself. Turn it by hand and it generates just enough electricity to power one unlock, long enough to get inside and swap the batteries properly. No app workaround, no locksmith call, no spare key hidden under a fake rock.
Amazon says the Ring Smart Lock ships in the first quarter of 2027, which puts actual hands-on reviews several months out. The $249 price tag lands it in the same range as the established names in the category it’s now challenging directly, rather than supplying hardware for. That’s the bigger shift here: Amazon building and selling its own lock instead of licensing the “Works with Ring” badge to someone else’s.
The lock wasn’t the only announcement. Ring also introduced five new cameras alongside it, including the company’s first-ever 4K models, a meaningful jump in image quality for a product line that has mostly shipped at lower resolutions. Amazon says the new camera lineup also includes an AI feature built specifically to help families locate a lost pet, scanning footage for an animal rather than leaving owners to scrub through hours of clips themselves.
Dead-battery anxiety is one of the most common complaints leveled at smart locks as a category, right up there with cold-weather lag and spotty Wi-Fi handoffs. Most manufacturers have answered it with notifications: a push alert when the battery hits 20 percent, maybe a backup keypad code. Ring’s answer is physical and offline by design, which matters if the whole reason you’re locked out is that your phone died too. Whether a hand-cranked dial actually delivers enough charge on a freezing night in February is exactly the kind of detail a press announcement can’t settle. Only a few months of real doorsteps will.
Related: Apple has been working this same smart home territory from a different angle, detailed in Apple’s secretly LG-built smart home gadgets, including its own deadbolt lock, and the pet-recognition idea behind Ring’s new cameras already showed up in a different form in Petlibro’s camera-equipped feeder that tells pets apart by sight.
Bottom Line: A hand crank sounds like a low-tech answer for a device with “smart” in its name, but it’s a smarter move than another gimmick feature nobody asked for. Ring just built a direct fix for the one failure mode people actually worry about with these locks. The real test isn’t the announcement, it’s whether that dial still works the way Amazon describes it after a cold winter and a forgotten battery swap, and that verdict won’t land until Q1 2027.
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