Hue By Philips – Lighten Up Your Home With Colors

Philips has always done the brightest things in the lifetime and every one is familiar with Philips and their work, now they released their latest electronics to brighten your houses and other places with colorful lights. Which are totally dependent on your selection by your smartphone.

It has the largest range of bulbs and lighting options, and it is supported by a huge number range of apps, services and developers. If you are thinking of making your home ‘smart’ then you cannot consider the Hue system. The Hue Starter Kit is arguably the best way into this ecosystem. It comes with three Hue light bulbs and the necessary ‘bridge’ to control them.

Automation & App

Once you get over the mannerism of the app, the Hue experience is an enjoyable one. Waking up to the ‘Energize’ lighting scene helps you get up and go in the morning, and it is nice to match your lighting to fit your mood. This lets you do all sorts of fun, useful and interesting things. For example, you could set your lights to be controlled by your Jawbone Up tracker it detects when you wake and turns on the lights consequently or your Nest Learning Thermostat could trigger lights to turn off when it detects you aren’t at home.

The official Hue app is not bad intrinsically, but it is not polished, either. It feels like Philips has seen the great backing it has from 3rd-party developers and decided it does not need to keep developing its own app. Getting started with Philips Hue is simple enough. Put your bulbs where you want them, plug in the provided bridge into your home network and then follow the steps in Philips’ app. We are criticizing minor details here as it is a minor inconvenience rather than a fundamental problem, but if wireless audio systems like Sonos can do away with bridges then it is reasonable to think Hue could.

Assessment

Hue is still the best smart lighting system, despite some rough edges.