Reviews for Philips Hue Connected Bulb - Starter Pack

I really want to like these bulbs, and they generally work great if you just want to control the lights at home, however if you ever want to control these lights remotely, you're going to have a lot of TROUBLE! The servers that run the meet hue website is very buggy and they constantly go down or don't respond at all. It constantly asks you to reconnect and reconnect and you wait forever and nothing happens. If you want people to love this product, you're going to have to fix this Philips!

I love the bulbs. The app is dysfunctional. There're so many things wrong with the app that I can't cover them here. My biggest issues:

1) Lighting is room focused. The app is "scene" focused. If you put your bulbs in different rooms the app's usability is diminished by an order of magnitude. If you create a new scene, it will automatically turn the lights on in all rooms unless you carefully do non-intuitive steps to avoid it. Most likely you will accidentally turn on lights in the bedroom while the wife is sleeping at least a few times a week. The page to change the color and intensity of the light FORCES you to use landscape mode. If you have your rotation locked it's impossible to do it. The page where you change color/intestinally has a control for every single light attached to the bridge. Even with three lights it's non-intuitive and error prone. Lights are numbered 1 2 3 .. n. If you don't memorize which bulb numbers are in which rooms you will certainly change the wrong light. I can't even imagine trying to use that page if you had 5 or 10 lights. If you have lights in three different rooms it will be extremely hard to not accidentally turn the light on and off in a different room. From the app, there is absolutely no way to know what lights will turn on with a given scene. The scene names are truncated at so few letters, you can't even name your scene something like "Bedroom - Purple" because it will be clipped. The app does allow for multiple pages to be created, so you can name each page a room and only put scenes for a room on that page, but because of bugs with scene syncing, you will find that your scenes get duplicated and rearranged on different pages so this hack becomes non-functional from the start.

2) There is no simple straight forward way to turn a light off. You would link there would be a way to do this, but there isn't. You have to tap a scene in order for the off button to appear. The catch 22 is that if the light was already off, it will turn it on. Looking at a scene on the page gives no indication that it's the active scene or that it's on. Again, an obvious usability issue.

3) Buggy! Timers don't work. All On/Off button doesn't work -- it's also a horrible idea anyway. Why would I want to turn on bulbs in multiple rooms and and off all at the same time? To make things worse, you can't delete the icon. If you log into the portal your scenes get duplicated and rearranged on different pages.
4) My one complaint with the bulbs is the minimum brightness. In a completely dark room at night, the darkest you can make the bulb is actually pretty bright. Incandescence bulbs can get way dimmer than the led. If you are trying to get a room as dark as a few candles or a night light, don't even bother. Even if the fade in over 9 minutes worked, I think the lowest output is already so bright that it would abruptly wake me up in the morning.

Thankfully, with the exception of point #4, all of my complaints have to do with software which I think will be addressed by 3rd party apps and/or phillips. Over all I'm happy with the physical product even though the software is hideous. Honestly, I'm shocked Apple approved this for exclusive sale on their stores. It reflects very poorly on them.

Was so excited to get this and am so disappointed in it... The app works intermittently. Turn off all lights and one of them stays on. Can't make it go off; actually had to switch the lamp off! Depending on where you stand in the house, the light that will be controlled will be whichever room your in, not any of the others, regardless of how you have them labelled! I wanted the system to set timers for off and on; this doesn't work either. Can't seem to use different programs for each light. It's all or nothing. Contacted Philips Hue support by email and no response for the past week...:( I would like my $ back.

Very easy to set up and initially really cool. At night they are not bright enough to light up a room. They are more of a toy rather than a practical improvement in your living space. I had them in for a week and took them out cause It is silly to have to swap out Hue bulb with real bulbs just so you can see.

Easy to setup, however returned after 3 days. Read in blogs that starter kit bulbs are linked to bridge that came with it so can't buy additional kits and keeps second bridge if first one dies. Thius all linked bulbs to that bridge are useless. Blogs say there r ways of getting around this with a Phillips remote or a program but why all the trouble when $200 is spent. Tried face booking philips as no support regarding hue could be found. Even then no response.
Also 50 watt bulbs so depending on room size will need a lot of bulbs!

Don't try to edit a scene on your iPhone. Even as you are designing it, the bulb colors and brightness settings will change without warning.

The settings will change even after you have saved them.

And if you try to edit your edited scenes on your iPad, the changes you made on your iPhone will not be transferred to your iPad. Scenes that you deleted on your iPhone will still appear on your iPad.

The cute handwriting font used to label scenes is unreadable.

Dear product manager: redesign this product from scratch. Watch users as they try to use it.

First the good news: when the bulbs are connected to the bridge, you can control them any way you want. The light is bright, and doesn't look like an LED.
I wonder if I am the only one who has this problem, but the bridge disconnects from the internet and the bulbs intermittently, sometimes several times a day, sometimes it runs w/o problems for some days. Only power cycle helps, and no, a complete reset doesn't work.
Timer: until now the system is not reliable at all.
APP: sometimes it works well, sometimes it cannot connect to the bridge ort the internet even though all three blue lights are on.
No support link on their homepage.

i just receved my Starterkit (3 Bulp) and plus 3 Bulps extra.
after setup HUE it is finding just the 3 extra Bulp but not the 3 Bulp's from starter kit.
after 3 times reseting the bridge no better result.
until yet no answer from the philips....

The overall quality appears high, the setup was a breeze, and the ability to fine tune each bulb was great.

All of that said though, the bulbs are non directional. I thought they would be a spot or a narrow / wide flood. Instead, they are like a standard bulb - they are like having a bare bulb in your track lighting system. They can not be used for highlighting your artwork or tuning in a color and intensity on a given wall - they blast the light out 360 degrees.

I'll be returning mine in the morning - great concept / they need directional bulbs though.