Reviews for Philips Hue Connected Bulb - Starter Pack

pros:
good bulbs, easy setup, works as advertised.
cons:
Was it really necessary to use an additional WiFi router? I hope that thing is safe and is not an open access door to the rest of my network.
I hate the App. Its about light bulbs. Give me some on and off switches on the first page, some color settings on the second page, some timers on the third page and I am happy. Make it easier to keep the light separated (I use them in different rooms). It is unnecessary to rested the settings inside the app anytime the iPhone sleeps. All the vacation photos are nice gadgets but not the main thing to control lights. Nest Thermostats did a way better job with their app.

23 of 26 people found this useful

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.

32 of 45 people found this useful

There are a lot of smart early adopters writing reviews for the HUE. I had the system running with three bulbs within about 15 minutes. The App can be improved but it is functional, very easy (for me) to program, and can be supplemented with the free QuickHue native OS X, Colors for Hue OS X, Magma Hue iOS 6, and others. I don't want to negate fellow reviewer's problems with HUE, but except for the interference issue that may affect connection stability, I believe that HUE is not ready for the general consumer market just yet, but the more technically involved of us appear to have little or no issues other than $60 per bulb. I installed multiple Apps on our iPhone 5 and 4S, and two MacBook Pros in a few minutes.

Wait a couple of months and the App issues will be largely resolved. HOWEVER, many of us that do not work with electronic life expectancy forget that there are 8,760 hours in a year, and a high duty cycle will have the AVERAGE unit failing in a few years (do the math), making them VERY expensive. I'm guessing that this will really be a heat issue. I'm an old analog electronics engineer and without any testing I can tell that I have difficulty holding the base when it runs 'wide open,' which means it is about 160 degrees F (71 degrees C,) not as cool as our intuition might guess. Future fixtures will eventually target the cooling issue, as most are now designed for incandescent bulbs, which have an entirely different set of challenges. HUE CAN be repaired (search for disassembled HUE bulbs) but it is not economically worthwhile at this time. There is also an issue with colorimetry but this will improve in the future.

25 of 33 people found this useful

The Hue is a brilliant concept, and the lights themselves are great and easy to hook up. The app, however, is disappointingly rudimentary, and until that is fixed, it renders this system little more than a gimmick. One example is that you have to set the timer each time you want the lights to come on -- there is no way to set daily, recurring times. Also, if you switch the lights off with a switch, they will default to their plain color, so you pretty much have to rely on the app -- and once the novelty of controlling lights with your phone wears off, that can get pretty old.

22 of 28 people found this useful

I just purchased the starter pack. I wanted to test out the software and hardware before buying more bulbs. I will be back to the apple store to collect all the bulbs they have in stock! This product is amazing. The original iOS app is pretty boring and limiting. The graphical interface is rather simple and boring. It works as promised, and the timer function is running without problems.

I quickly went on HUE's developer section to find documentation for the RESTful API. Works like a charm - I built my own interface in literally 10 minutes. I am now building HUE into my smart home. I cannot think of a more time and cost efficient solution. I can't wait to hook my Arduino board up with these bulbs!

20 of 24 people found this useful

I bought the starter pack and 5 additional bulbs so I could add more creative fun to the hallway where our family does lot of "kid stuff". It has 4 fixtures with 8 bulbs total.

The fixtures have frosted glass with a tan tint and I was a little worried that would cause a lot of problems. In practice, it's noticeable in that with high brightness, the fixture does tend to get a little more "white" with brightness. I think in a recessed lighting situation, the color would be less white and obviously more true.

These are definitely expensive, but that's the early adopter, awesome product, cool factor... plus the fact that they're amazing. ;-) For the price and the amount of time I expect to use these, they will be well worth the amount spent. (Including this winter where it's already dark and cold outside so early and the kids are inside playing a lot.)

While I expect Hue to make its way into other rooms of the house, but slowly. The app is a little lacking in what I would call multi-room support. There are definitely ways to "make it work" -- still things like a default that you can set for in room switch-on/off are important and need to come soon.

Still, I have to give this a five because it's truly great, beautiful and easy to use. This type of thing is truly future of lighting... Good bye incandescent... As the costs of this tech comes down, I finally do see your end.

19 of 22 people found this useful

I read a bunch of the reviews before decided to purchase this lighting system. And most (if not all) were very positive, etc... So I stopped by my Apple store to see if they had a set.. and they did. Came home and unboxed them and literally within minutes, the lights were up and working.. just like everyone said... The app for the iPhone/iPad is cool but I can see some room for improvement. But it's not bad. Over all I am more than happy with this purchase.

15 of 15 people found this useful

These lights are pretty nifty, but at 600 lumens don't really throw off enough light for much. They are an expensive, innovative way of decorating with light, just don't expect it to be a great reading light.

15 of 15 people found this useful

It's tough to give these a great review because the functionality doesn't work as advertised. You're supposed to be able to set up a timer to fade in and fade out, but all you get is instant on or instant off. The app is terrible, and anyone on here that tries to deny that probably works for Phillips or has some vested interest in this product's success. The coloring system works well and is kind of fun, so they're great if you are into constantly messing around with your lights. But the app makes this so painful, you just give up after a while. Right now, wishing I would have held off on buying these until I saw less negative reviews. Phillips still has a lot of work to do to make the software more functional. Suprising that the technology in the app is so far behind the bulb itself.

19 of 24 people found this useful

Luckily enough, I ordered mine as soon as it appeared on the store and got it within a couple of days. Now it takes many weeks to get one. The set up is as easy as if it was an Apple product. The user interface is great and the end result is definitely cool. Plus every bit of design (hardware as well as software as well as packaging. I nearly made a video of the unboxing) is neat and elegant. The downside? I play all the time with my iPhone/Remote and my daughters (8 and 4 years old) think I'm acting childish.

14 of 14 people found this useful