Philips Hue Personal Wireless Lighting review

These days there’s an app for everything. Heck, there’s even one for the lights in your house. For real--if you’ve always dreamed of using your smartphone to dim the living room chandelier before binge watching How To Get Away With Murder or switching on your night lamp to a rosy hue to wake you wake up, now you can.

It is here, this Internet of Things. The Philips Hue lighting system is a solid example of the possibility of controlling a mundane household object with your smartphone for that ‘Oh neat!’ effect. It’s one of those things you don’t really need, but something you might just desperately want. The concept behind this product is simple--LED bulbs that contain a built-in wireless receiver, which are controlled by a little box that plugs into your wireless network.

We got our hands on the Philips Hue lighting starter kit--a box containing three ‘smart’ LED bulbs along with the Hue Bridge--the tiny device that controls them all. Setup is unspeakably simple--literally three steps, as outlined in the quick start leaflet. Screw in the bulbs, connect the Hue Bridge to a free LAN port of your wireless router, download and follow the Hue app. That’s it. The bulbs get detected and you can quickly launch into the next hour of gleefully controlling the colors and intensity of your room’s lighting with a deft slide of your finger.

The Hue app detected the Hue Bridge almost immediately, along with each of the three lights in the system. This app has several sections for different kinds of lighting control. Tapping on ‘Scenes’ gives you access to a range of preset colors that are creatively named--from the evocative (Sunset, Relax, Deep Sea) to the arcane (Pencil, Kathy, Taj).

Seeing your room lights smoothly morph from one color to another at the beckon of your smartphone is actually quite cool. It’s something you’ll definitely want to call everyone over to experience. Light-based Scenes aside, the app does have a practical side, such as turning them on after a preset intercaval or switching them off after a user defined duration. When you get bored of these activities, you can also download additional apps for the Hue system, many of which are paid. So if you want Hue Disco or Hue Christmas, you’ll need to fork over upwards of Rs 100 for each of them.

But this is the Internet of Things, and there’s plenty of scope for getting truly creative.when the app is teamed up with the likes of a program like IFTTT, you can potentially launch Hue events using any popular app on your smartphone as a trigger (think “Turn my room lights blue when I receive an SMS from my girlfriend”.) The Hue app also has a web interface you can log into, from where you can potentially control the system from virtually any location that has Internet connectivity.

At Rs 16,995, this certainly isn’t a fun gadget you can buy on a whim (each extra bulb will also set you back by about Rs 6,449.) But if you want to get into the Internet of Things early in the game--not to mention having unquestionable boasting rights--the Philips Hue is a peek into our thoroughly Internet-connected future.

What we liked: An undeniably unique home lighting experience, very easy to set up.

What we didn’t: Gawk-inducing pricing that’s not for the casual geek, many of the truly fun apps are paid