

Neither of those require a hub, just your phone and an app. Lifx works with your Wi-Fi, while the C by GE uses Bluetooth. With options like the Philips Hue, the smarts are in the bulb, but you also need a bridge - a separate, boxy device - to get them working. There are oodles of smart bulbs out there. I actually have a combination of all three going on right now, and there are pros and cons of each. There are a number of ways to make your lights smart: There are smart bulbs, smart switches, and smart plugs. There are some differences between Alexa and Siri, and we’ll get to those later. Pulling out my phone and asking Siri to turn on my lights isn’t too burdensome, but it did confuse my friend, who thought I was asking her to do my bidding.
#Philips hue party mode Bluetooth
Enter the Amazon Dot: The $50 puck imbued with Alexa, paired with a Bluetooth speaker.Īs my condo is just 850 square feet, I can shout at Alexa to turn on my lights from pretty much anywhere. That means I could use HomeKit-compatible bulbs, but if he wanted to turn on the lights via voice-control, we needed another option.
#Philips hue party mode android
First, I have an iPhone, while my husband uses an Android device.

I can’t even count the number of LED and smart lightbulbs I have lying around, but when picking out smart lights for the DT smart apartment, I had a number of factors to consider. They’re installed like regular lightbulbs and with a 20+-year lifespan, it’s important that they’re portable. Lights are one of the easiest and most affordable entrances to a smart home, and smart bulbs are perfect for apartment dwellers. In the Smart Apartment series, we’ll look at gadgets that are affordable, portable, and hopefully useful.Īnd for the first installment, I wanted to tackle lighting. At the end of the series, we’ll examine the smart apartment as an ecosystem, and how all these devices - or do not - work together.ĭigital Trends is outfitting a condo in Seattle with tons of smart-home devices suited for an apartment. Each week, we’ll tackle a different category and look at various products, then explain how we made our selections. That’s why we decided to outfit a whole condo with smart devices that don’t require rewiring or permanent installation.

Plus, apartments have different needs than single-family homes. Smart-home devices sometimes require complicated installation that just doesn’t make sense for renters.
