Philips Hue Ambiance

THE MIDDLE CHILD THAT COMBINES MOOD LIGHTING WITH AFFORDABILITY.

PHILIPS HUE RANGE of smart lighting systems are some of the most widely compatible and well-supported on the market and, in Australia, we’ve previously had a choice of buying either coloured bulbs or ones that produce a neutral white light. This new White Ambiance kit combines elements of both to give you a choice of tones within the soft white spectrum, from warm candlelight to cool blue daylight. So although there are no colours, you still get mood lighting and regular white light in the one bulb.

The kit is comprised of two E27 LED bulbs, a Hue Bridge communications hub and a handy remote switch. And installation is as simple as screwing in the bulbs, connecting the Bridge to your router and setting up the Hue app. That done, light controls are at your fingertips or just a voice command away — the latter via Siri on Apple devices, or Google Assistant on Android. The kit works exceedingly well with both Apple’s HomeKit system and the equivalent Google Home environment.

To make lighting your home easier, Hue’s new routines allow you to set up timers for when you want lights in different rooms to come on or switch off — which can even be tailored to specific tones (or ‘scenes’) — without constantly having to dig your phone out of your pocket. That can include things like bedroom lights switching on or off at the time you want to wake up or go to sleep, or automatically switching the home lights on after sunset. The location-aware routines are handier still, which will track your phone’s location and work the lights automatically as you leave home or return.

In testing, our only real complaints were that the Ambiance bulbs weren’t as bright as we had hoped, and that the Google and Apple digital assistants don’t come with the vocabulary to handle descriptions of various white light tones, meaning that, if you want to change a ‘scene’ or tone, it’s best done via the app.