The company is certainly hitting the buzzwords. "We’ve designed [Lyric] to be mobile-first and DIY," says Beth Wozniak, president of Honeywell’s environmental and combustion control division (the company’s heating and cooling arm). "The timing was right in terms of everyone having phones, multiple people in homes having phones, and everyone’s comfort level in using their phones to control their lifestyles."

A whole suite of products is still a ways off, but Lyric marks Honeywell’s renewed efforts at building a home-automation system people will actually want to use. While Honeywell has offered a number of Wi-Fi-enabled thermostats for several years, this one marks probably the first true competitor to the Nest Learning Thermostat. "Most thermostats are built by plumbing companies," said Tony Fadell when the Nest first launched, a clear dig at the kinds of products Honeywell has been making for years.

Lyric’s design, however, is a huge (and much-needed) departure from the company’s other Wi-Fi thermostats. It conveys in equal parts the company’s iconic "Round" thermostat as well as the more modern Nest, with its large display and outer ring that smoothly rotates to adjust the temperature up and down. Customer feedback said the continuous rotation was preferable to a more mechanical-feeling wheel, but people also wanted some sort of feedback. Honeywell built in an audible clicking tone that sounds with each degree you adjust the thermostat — the smooth, uninterrupted scroll of the wheel combined with the clicking feedback brings to mind the iPod’s iconic wheel as well as the Nest thermostat. It may not be the most original design decision, but it works.

Despite an abundance of plastic, the Lyric prototype I had a chance to play with felt like a solid piece of hardware that could stand up to daily adjustments. The front only has two buttons: one to toggle between your preset "at home" and "away" temperatures, and one to pull up a 12-hour weather forecast — a layout mimicked when you open up the smartphone app. "Our concept here was our homeowners and our consumers said, 'We want it to be simple on the wall,'" explains Wozniak. "'We don’t want to have to stand at the wall and enter in information and program it.'" As such, Lyric is a much friendlier and simpler device when compared with Honeywell’s voice-activated Alto thermostat, which is dominated by a large screen and an overabundance of information.

While it’s a classy piece of hardware, the most innovative feature of the Lyric thermostat isn’t its physical design — it’s the usage of geofencing to update your house’s climate based on whether anyone is home or not. Once the thermostat is set up and you’ve installed the corresponding app on your iOS or Android device, Lyric will know when you’ve left the house and will adjust your heating / cooling system to your pre-chosen "nobody home" setting. When you reenter the geofence, the system kicks back on so it’ll be comfortable when you return.

Honeywell is including two different geofence settings — there’s a 7-mile radius for suburban settings in which you’ll likely be farther from home, and a 500-foot setting that’ll likely be more appropriate for city-dwellers. And multiple devices from different household members can be added to your account, so the system will truly only switch modes if the house is entirely empty. The company sees geofencing as the next evolution of the "schedules" that most people put their thermostats on now. "The fact that you don’t even have to think about your temperature when you’re coming and going means that you don’t have to learn a schedule; you don’t have to program one in," says Wozniak.