Philips Hue Connected Bulb Starter Pack Review: Lighting up Your Connected Life > 자유게시판

Like a lot of the new breed of consumer-installable, smartphone-managed dwelling tech merchandise, the WiFi-connected Philips Hue lighting equipment has high geek/novelty attraction. After all, it is a shade-altering, LED light bulb bundle you possibly can program from a smartphone. But beyond its remote on/off and scheduling capabilities you may must get really into the extended features--like geofencing and IFTTT assist--to make this package worth $199 (AU$249 for these in Australia). These options will not attraction universally, but they will have their area of interest fans. What EcoLight home lighting occasion DJ or dorm room Lothario wouldn't love an automated, multihued temper-setter? For the hyper-related, setting the lights to blink with each retweet may be a draw. By smartly allowing the general public to make its personal apps for the Hue, Philips has also left the doors of chance wide open. Even if you do not recognize the Hue's superior options now, someone may sooner or later write an app for it that perfectly fills some unrealized want. I wouldn't recommend the Philips Hue Related Bulb package if all you want is fundamental distant lighting controls, however it is a reliable, principally straightforward-to-use alternative if you wish to inject some intelligence into your home lighting scheme.

The Philips Hue Connected Bulb Starter Kit contains three LED light bulbs and the Hue Bridge. The Bridge is a hub that plugs directly into your wireless router and interprets indicators between your Wi-Fi-related smartphone and the ZigBee-based mostly bulbs. You would possibly want Philips had found a way to remove the Bridge, just like the purely Wi-Fi-based Lifx bulbs or Bluetooth-primarily based iLumi. These bulbs cost $89 and EcoLight home lighting $79 a bit, respectively, which means that Philips' ZigBee-primarily based solution, EcoLight ($fifty nine per when you buy them individually), appears to impart some price financial savings. You'll be able to always decide up an extra-lengthy Ethernet cable and conceal the Bridge in a closet somewhere if you find it unsightly. If you happen to assume you will expand into other linked residence products like a Sonos system, or a smart lock or two, regulate the forthcoming multidevice controller hubs that assist Hue, just like the one included with the Logitech Harmony Final common remote, or the Revolv Smart Residence Answer Wi-Fi Hub due out later this 12 months.

As soon as you've related the Bridge and installed just a few bulbs, you merely download and install the free Philips iOS or Android app, which will then immediate you to hit the Bridge's sync button. The app, Bridge, and bulbs ought to all find each other a few seconds later. For the reason that Hue kit has been available on the market since fall 2012, you would possibly receive a Bridge with outdated firmware. You can use the app to examine, however you might also must cycle the facility once or twice before you get an accurate studying. The official Hue app just isn't probably the most intuitive piece of software. Its main display shows a grid of preset lighting schemes ("recipes," per Philips) designed for all three mild bulbs. Some recipes, like Studying, or Focus, trigger familiar, utilitarian shades of white and yellow mild. Others -- Sunset, Deep Sea, Kathy (?) -- dip into the spectrum of 16 million colours available to the Hue. Select any of those presets and your bulbs will change almost instantly.

Choosing additionally launches an onscreen brightness slider, framed by buttons to edit the preset, and to turn it off. Philips will allow you to monitor lights, modify their brightness, and switch them on or off remotely as soon as you have signed up and logged into the online-based mostly consumer. To make new presets or edit current ones, you must be on your home community. Enhancing and creating new presets is the place the Philips app expertise can turn into cumbersome. Philips has spread the varied customization capabilities across totally different sections of the app. The settings icon presents you with a easy, per-bulb coloration selection device. But whenever you go to make a preset lighting scheme, Philips only helps you to assign colors by choosing them from a reference image file. You can pull photographs from your photo library, or seize them in the app immediately, or EcoLight home lighting even download them from Philips' Internet site, but without that supply picture, you haven't any approach apparent strategy to assign a specific shade to a preset.