Philips hue white vs white ambiance android#

The Hue Lux has been officially canceled.

And one such exciting product from them is the Philips Hue Lux bulb. The Philips Hue lineup has quite a range of smart light bulbs and light fixtures to choose from. It will provide a wider range of home automation. It means that you can easily combine Philips Hue with other ZigBee based devices. Philips Hue is mainly used as a smart home device because all of its products use ZigBee protocol. Philips Hue is adding new features and evolving the system to make the smart lights even more useful. You can control almost all your home devices by combining Philips Hue with Zigbee based devices. ZigBee is a low-power, safe, and good technology that is generally used to control smart home devices. All generations of the Philips Hue family are based upon ZigBee Light Link. Since that time, a new range of lights has been added along with new bridges and hubs.

Philips Hue came about 4 years ago in the market. But first, you should know how they are similar to each other to get a better idea of their differences. Neither one will work with HomeKit, but each one has a lot to offer in its own right, and deserves a look before buying in with Hue.Philips Hue and Lux, are almost same with only a few minor differences. In fact, it faces some fairly strong competition from the likes of Lifx and Stack, both of which offer comparably-priced color tunable bulbs that outperformed the Hue White Ambiance LEDs in my tests. And, if you want to splurge on something a little more feature rich, then the full-color, $200 kit that comes with a third bulb is probably worth your while.Īnd, of course, Hue isn't alone in the category - not with color-changing bulbs, and not with color tunable ones, either. If you just want the cheapest kit that comes with a Hue Bridge, then your best bet is to skip the color-tuning ambiance and go with the $80 Hue White kit. Still, the White Ambiance kits might be in a tricky spot. Philips wants that Hue Bridge in as many homes as possible, and putting out a variety of different starter kits with different feature sets and price points seems like the right strategy. The Philips Hue White Ambiance Starter Kit is yet another avenue into the larger Hue ecosystem, and that's probably the point. Starter kit includes Philips Hue Dimmer Switch Starter kit includes Apple HomeKit-compatible Philips Hue Bridge

Philips Hue White and Color Ambiance Starter Kit Still, that means you have to have a scene ready before the mood strikes to ask Siri to change up your lighting, which obviously isn't ideal. This includes those native Hue scenes, like the 'Concentrate' mode I mentioned before. Tell Siri to run one of those scenes, and she'll fire it off without incident, even if it includes color temperature changes. Maybe teaching Siri to recognize thousands of specific color temperatures is a bit much, but would it have been so hard to let her know what 'daylight' means? The color tunability and the Siri compatibility are the two top selling points here - why is there a wall between them?įortunately, there's a workaround: Hue's scenes. Philips Hue was an early and enthusiastic member of the HomeKit bandwagon, and that white light spectrum's been there from the beginning. Ask her to set a bulb to 'daylight,' or 'soft white,' or '2,700 K,' and nothing will happen. I've got just one qualm here: Siri doesn't have a vocabulary for the white light spectrum. Aside from that, a lot of the differences are purely cosmetic - though to its credit, it is a better-looking app than before. It adds in new lighting scene presets for your bulbs, including white-spectrum-specific presets like 'Concentrate' and 'Relax.' It also borrows a page from the HomeKit playbook and lets you group bulbs by room.

Philips hue white vs white ambiance android#

There is a new Philips Hue app, available for both Android and iOS devices. At $30 a piece, they're essentially taking the place of the soft-white-only Philips Hue Lux bulbs, which were phased out last year. The new bulbs look like the old ones, and the new white light spectrum controls have actually been a feature of the full-color Hue bulbs since the very beginning. Specifically, I'd point to the sensor-powered Stack LED downlights and the Lifx White 800 LED as strong alternatives - and arguably better ones if you aren't married to HomeKit. And, as for brightness, almost all of them have flat-out passed Philips by. That broad compatibility has always been one of Hue's best selling points, but keep in mind that the competition has done a lot of catching up in the last year or so.