So a few days ago I picked up a set of Phillips Hue lightbulbs to review.  I had heard really good things about both the colours and the user interface.

Packaging:

The packaging is really smart and integrates a very neat colour wheel, which is a very nice fun touch.   You feel that someone has cared which helps with the buying experience,  as they are really quite expensive.

Installation:

The bulbs are Eddison Screw,  so in the UK you will either have to buy adapters, or rewire the standard bayonet fittings.  I had one Ikea lamp that took E27 bulbs,  so that was easy, and as I’m a practical boy bought some new drop fittings for my existing pendant light fittings.

Now I can’t blame Phillips for this, but the only ones I could find where black, even the mighty ScrewFix do not stock E27 pendant fittings, so you may have to hunt around.  Additionally these have a greater diameter than BC fittings so my lampshades now don’t fit.   This was a frustrating that I wasn’t expecting.

Connecting the bridge was easy,  that requires a physical network connection to your broadband hub and a power lead.   This can be wall mounted, but the cables connect to the base of this unit, so this as missed an opportunity to be as elegant as the bulbs.

First Use:

With the bulbs installed, they will work as regular lightbulbs, switching on and off on the normal switch.  Switching them on in this way they look and act like standard bulbs.  Which is good.

With the app downloaded to my phone, this is linked to the bridge with a very simple pairing process.   Then the fun can begin,  or actually it can’t.

The first 2 features that I was looking for in the app were:

• A colour wheel,  so you can play at changing the colour of the bulb.
• A party mode that just randomly changes colour,  bonus points if it reacts to music.

Neither of these exist in the standard app.   You set the colour of the lamps by setting up Scenes or Light Recipes.  Several are included by default, with a simple click all the bulbs smoothly transition between the colours.   Creating a Scene is easy, you select a photograph from your phone add it to the app and then select the colours from that photograph that you wish each bulb to emulate.  You can also set which bulbs Scenes will use,  so if the bulbs are in different rooms then your not randomly turning on a bedroom light at the same time as the sitting room.Scenes define the colour and the bulbs to be used, I was expecting to be able to select a colour / mood and then send that to a set of bulbs, or room.   The default scenes are all called relax / skiing,  the ones I have created have names like “Bed Reading” or it would do if you were not restricted to 8 characters.

My other frustration is the alarm function,  this will only repeat for at the same time every day.   So you can’t set a later wakeup time for the weekends.   Additionally while there is a fade option, this doesn’t simulate sunrise as I first suspected, but is an auto off timer.

Summary:

So I have some frustrations with the Phillips Hue system during my first interactions.  However the bulbs are very good, the light and colours are amazing, and Phillips have opened up the API, so it is compatible with IFTTT and other 3rd party apps.  This I think is were they will prove to be vastly superior to other colour changing bulbs that are on the market.  I will report back with how I get on with actually living with this product before I give a final verdict.

Edit: I was wrong, you can set alarms to repeat on a given week day, which is a very good thing. The flip side to that is of the 3 alarms I have set none of them have worked as expected. Will post a follow up as I learn more.