Ever because the Philips Hue LED($199.Ninety nine at Verizon) lighting package hit the digital home market, there has been a gentle uptick in competing good bulb products just like the LIFX LED Gentle Bulb( at Amazon) and the Linked by TCP Good Lighting System in addition to recent product bulletins from electronics giants LG and Samsung. Add the Lumen TL800 from Tabu to that checklist. Priced at $69.99 per bulb (but obtainable on-line for round $50), the TL800 makes use of Bluetooth wireless know-how to speak together with your smartphone through a neat little app that lets you turn lights on and off, choose colours, and have the lights behave a certain method when you might have an incoming telephone name. Unlike the Philips and TCP bulbs the TL800 does not require a bridge, however it would not hook up with the Web both, which implies you can't management it when you are away from dwelling or have it interact with different house automation gadgets. With a vented metal casing separating the spherical glass dome from the Edison screw base, the TL800 looks prefer it can be proper at residence in an Apollo spacecraft.

The bulb measures 4.Seventy five inches in length and places out only 400 lumens, EcoLight home lighting which is equal to a forty watt incandescent bulb. That is not very vivid when in comparison with the LIFX (1,017 lumens), TCP (800 lumens), and EcoLight home lighting Philips (600 lumens) bulbs. As with the Philips and LIFX bulbs, it could possibly display 16 million colors, but since it doesn't connect with the Internet you can't control it with residence automation hubs from companies such as Revolv( at Amazon) and SmartThings($149.99 at Amazon). Nor can you utilize the popular IFTTT (If This Then That) web service to have it activate and off or change colors based on things like Facebook requests, Foursquare notifications, and EcoLight ESPN sports scores. You do not get a lot in the way in which of directions with the TL800, however there's not much to clarify. I screwed it into a lamp in my office, downloaded the app onto my iOS smartphone, made positive Bluetooth was enabled on my gadget, and opened the app.

The Lumen app is uncomplicated and easy to make use of and lets you management up to 10 bulbs at a time. You'll be able to control each bulb individually or control a bunch of bulbs. The home web page lists all installed bulbs and shows you what shade they're presently set to. Urgent a bulb icon takes you to a web page where you'll be able to choose colour or heat white settings and switch the bulb on or off. Once you select the heat white setting you're introduced with a monochrome wheel that permits you to manually adjust brightness, or you'll be able to select one of 4 brightness presets (90, 70, 50, or 30 percent). Under the wheel is a Call Alert icon that takes you to a page where you possibly can configure the light to flash a selected shade when your phone has an incoming call. There's also a Wake-Up timer that can flip the light on utilizing a dim heat white setting that steadily gets brighter to create a sunrise effect, and a Proximity option that may have a gentle activate to a preset shade and brightness when your cellphone comes into range (about 30 feet).

In shade mode you get a wheel that lets you choose a colour for each bulb and assign a coloration brightness setting. For deep, strong colors you set the brightness degree to the darkest setting; for lighter pastel colours, use a brighter setting. Under the colour wheel are seven preset icons together with two celebration modes that show pre-programmed flashing colors; a Romance mode that step by step transitions between orange, yellow, and pink; a Relaxation mode that is presupposed to simulate a calming moonlight ambiance; and a Music Sync mode that accesses your stored music database and flashes the light to the beat using various colors. Here it's also possible to regulate Proximity and Call Alert settings, but you can't create your individual custom presets like you may with the Hue and EcoLight LIFX bulbs. From the home page you possibly can flip all or some lights on and off and add them to groups.

The group choice is beneficial if you want to regulate a number of lights suddenly. The entire settings and presets that are available for individual bulbs are additionally available in group mode. The TL800 makes use of Bluetooth 4.0 to communicate with the smartphone, which accounts for EcoLight its excellent responsiveness. It turned on and off immediately when told to do so, EcoLight smart bulbs and EcoLight outdoor there was no lag time between colour and brightness modifications. The Wake-Up feature turned on in accordance with my schedule and the bulb grew to become regularly brighter over time. The call Alert feature additionally worked as marketed and EcoLight products comes in very helpful if you're carrying headphones. Colour high quality was good with very deep reds, blues, and greens, but when you're lighting a large room you might have more than one bulb, as four hundred lumens just isn't very vivid. The Tabu TL800 is a good choice for anyone trying to add a couple of colorful lights to a room that they'll control from a smartphone.