Philips continues to expand the Hue range with a fast-growing range of new lighting ideas that better position its smart home lights into the world of the modern smart home owner.
The theme of wellness and health is a key part of many company’s drives into the smart home, think the Apple Watch, so enter Philips and the Ambiance Wellness Table Lamp.
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Key features
The Ambiance Wellness Table Lamp is an attractive, mains-powered, designer lamp for your living room or bedroom. Using the Hue Bridge, you can control the light from anywhere in the home, or when you’re out and about.
It puts out 10 watts, or around 800 lumens, a whopping 50,000 shades of white, and is only $99 (For the latest prices and discounts, check here).
If you get a separate Hue Bridge, then you can connect it for voice control via Alexa, which might be a key feature for many. But it will also work with Apple’s HomeKit, Google’s Nest and Samsung’s SmartThings, so can fit neatly into most smart home set ups.
Offering the full range of warm-to-cool white shades, it can be tuned to fit your mood, help wake you up or get you to sleep using the app of voice control. But it is when the Wellness Table Lamp is linked to your health and fitness devices that it really comes into its own.
Link the lamp using IFTTT commands to gadgets like the Fitbit and Jawbone, and it will work with the data from those devices to automatically fit in with your schedules.
The black and white, glass and wood, unit looks charming on any table, and can be ordered via voice command to illuminate your space for whatever task, some light reading, focused work or just to relax at the end of a day.
Pros of the Philips Hue Ambiance Wellness Table Lamp
The idea of the modern smart home is that it fits into, and enhances, our lives. The Wellness Lamp fits into the enhancing category, with the aim of fitting in with your mood, making you feel better during your day, and getting the most out of your time with it.
With its AA+ to A eco rating, it also helps save energy, but the point of the lamp is to help maximise your own personal energy too. The lamp comes with a White Ambience bulb offering around 25,000 hours of use.
Using the app you can fine tune the temperature of the bulb, set it to come on at the right time, but it is when used with a Fitbit and Jawbone health band that you get the real value. These come with a sleep tracking mode that measure the duration and quality of sleep.
Link those into the IFTTT commands, and you can get the light coming on as you wake up naturally, to help your body adjust – that’s especially useful in the dark winter mornings, The same can be said for helping you get to sleep, if you have trouble dropping off.
Cons of the Philips Hue Ambiance Wellness Table Lamp
This $99 lamp (For the latest prices and discounts, check here) neatly encapsulates a lot of the benefits of a smart home in one practical package.
However, the same can be done with a solo ambience bulb (Philips Hue or another brand) that you can plug into any frosted-style lamp. Tie that in with some smart app or your health tracker and you can probably achieve pretty much the same effect.
The model is also only available in the one black and white style, which while pretty universal, might not suit all tastes. Also, to be clear, it is not one of those seasonal adjustment disorder (SAD) lamps that can help people overcome the winter blues, just in case the marketing confuses.
Then there’s the need for a fitness band, which are highly personal, this doesn’t seem to be compatible with Microsoft’s Band, and with new fitness products coming on all the time, there’s no guarantee that Philips team will support them all.
Jawbone has already given up on the fitness market as Apple Watch begins to dominate wearable sales, so while the Hue light might last years, there’s less guarantee any fitness product will keep up.
Summary
Growing numbers of people are linking the random bits of their smart lives together, and the Ambiance Wellness Table Lamp is one of those devices that can help.
It can glue the health tracker on your wrist to the smart light in your room. Just how much anyone would get out of that is up to them, and for how long the likes of Fitbits and Jawbones last
With increasing types of smart lighting products, and smart health gear around the home, these links will become more useful and refined over time, but for now the Wellness lamp makes a great starting point.
From a soft light glow to end the day, or a bright light to help illuminate a tricky spot of work, this lamp is there to help put up the right ambiance and light level at the right time.
Put a little effort into linking it into your smart home and it could help your life be a little better, but there’s a possibility you can do it for less cost, or the marketing might not quite live up to expectation, only a longer term test will find that out.
If you want something a little different, the Philips Hue Wellner light has a more modern styling, but is basically the same system, just presented in a funkier way.
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