Ring is building a smart lock for the first time, and the feature it leads with is a hand crank. If the battery dies, you turn a manual power dial on the lock to generate enough power to unlock the door. Ring has priced the lock at $249, with a US release planned for the first quarter of 2027.
Why a crank on a smart lock
A camera that goes offline is inconvenient. A lock that goes offline leaves you standing outside your own house. Ring founder Jamie Siminoff points to the battery as the thing that holds smart locks back, and he described the problem this way, per TechCrunch:
I struggled because this particular house will get used very little, and I know the freaking battery will die on it.
The crank is Ring’s answer to that specific fear. Rather than asking you to trust the battery, it gives you a mechanical way to get in when the battery has let you down.
How you get in day to day
Under normal conditions the lock supports four unlock methods. Ring quotes roughly a year of battery life between charges.
- Fingerprint: on-device reader
- Keypad: entry codes on the lock
- Ring app: unlock from your phone
- Alexa: voice control through Amazon’s assistant
Worth being clear about what that ecosystem means. This is an Amazon product, not an Android-native one. Your entry events and remote unlocks run through a Ring account and Alexa. If you already run Ring cameras, your front door now sits in the same account that holds your footage. See our earlier coverage of Ring’s end-to-end encryption default for how the company has handled that data so far.
Price and availability
The lock costs $249 and is slated for the first quarter of 2027 in the United States only. It has also not cleared FCC authorization yet. Ring’s own press image carries the standard disclaimer that the device cannot be offered for sale or lease until that authorization arrives.
So treat this as an announcement rather than a product you can buy. A late-2026 reveal for a Q1 2027 US-only launch leaves plenty of room for the price, the timing, or the feature list to shift first.
The cameras announced alongside it
Ring used the same event to refresh its camera range. Four of the five new models shoot 4K, and the fifth is a 2K indoor pan-tilt unit.
- Floodlight Cam 4K Plus: $219.99
- Spotlight Cam 4K Plus: $199.99
- Outdoor Cam 4K Plus: $149.99
- Indoor Cam 4K: $99.99
- Pan-Tilt Indoor Cam 2K: $69.99
The cameras are the volume business, but the lock is the more interesting product. A crank is an unglamorous, mechanical answer to a problem the smart-home industry has mostly tried to solve with better firmware and bigger batteries.
Sources: TechCrunch, Android Authority
