Philips - Hue Bridge 2nd Generation - White

Good network lighting solution Setup: If you don’t have a Hue bridge already, you will need one to use the lamp. The Hue bridge is easy to set up. All you need is a wired network connection on your home modem or router. I set mine up on a wired port on a child node on my wireless network and it worked fine. After the bridge is connected and turned on, you need to install the Hue app on your mobile phone or use the Hue web site to connect to the bridge. My bridge needed a software update at setup. The app said the update was complete, but pressing “Done” after the update was “successful” did nothing. I had to perform the update again (or perform a second update) before the bridge would work. Once bridge is updated and online, the app will guide you through connecting all of the Hue lights within range. Individual lights can be assigned to rooms. Control: Lights can be controlled individually or as a group within each room. The app will work locally over your wireless network or remotely over your phones cellular service if you establish an account at the my.meethue.com. The web interface to your my.meethue.com account will allow you to enable/disable your bridge and mobile app, but it will not allow you to control your lights. This must be done through the app. There are three types of lights available for your Hue system. The basic “white” light can be dimmed, but will not vary in color, remaining fixed at 2700K. There are two types of “ambiance” bulbs. The “white ambiance” bulb can be varied from warm (2200K) to cool (6500K). With the “color ambiance” bulbs you can use any one of 16 million colors. You could get “funkadelic” with a few of these bulbs in one room. The app allows you to control the brightness and color (“ambiance” bulbs only) of each Hue bulb in your lighting network. The app can be controlled by touch or voice commands. If you choose to share location information with the app (and have an active my.meethue.com account), you can control the behavior of your lights as you leave and return home. This might freak out those who are still in the house, but it’s possible. You can also set schedules for each bulb (or room) that vary by day of the week. You can even specify the “width” of a random window for the beginning and end of each cycle. The automation system is well thought out and implemented and great when you plan to be away from home for a few days.

I have had a hue bridge and lights for sometime now and I love it. I have hue lights throughout my house and being able to control them all , on off, brightness, and color for the places I have those bulbs is great. Easy to set up, and just works great. That said a few things have improved over the last 2 years to give this product a true 5 Star review. 1) The app is finally decent -- it was brutal before, so brutal that a third party app for hue lights worked better. Now it is easy to setup scenes and light groups so you can control various lights in groups, and have preset customized colors and or brightness 2) BR30 Bulbs in white! For those of us with recessed lights, or finished basements, the only option for the longest time was the colored lights. And that can get REALLY Expensive, especially if it is in an area that you have lots of lights, and do not even want the color capabilities. Well now you can get HUE Dimmable White bulbs at a fraction of the cost. ( Be careful though to by HUE not just Phillips or it wont work ) 3) Harmony Hub integration - If you use harmony hub for your home, you can integrate it so that you can create a complete activity with lighting. So for example hitting the watch movie button on your remote, can not only turn on the tv and sound, then switch to your roku, but it can also set the lights to the color/brightness state you want. 4) Integrates to Echo ( and to google home, especially if you are using the harmony )That's right, you can control light groups by name and for on and off. 5) The Hue Switch. At first we had the Hue Tap - it was kind of clunky, hard to press the buttons, I for one didnt like it, but it was better than having to use the physical switch and actually turn the lights off, - but now they have the Hue Switch. It can be set to turn things on or off and or DIM, and its not only super user friendly, works great, but is pretty inexpensive. If you have been thinking about getting into the world of customized lighting, the product concept is really well flushed out at this point.

Hue second generation hub. This was one of my first purchases and I was very hesitant. I didn’t know much about smart things but it was so easy to hook up to My Hue Go lamp that I was simply amazed! By the way you can buy the hub with several bulbs and it’s much more cost-effective. But I didn’t do it that way because I wasn’t sure about the lightbulbs just yet my recommendation: buy the hub and the several lightbulbs all at once it’s cheaper that way! This controller I have mounted on the wall in my office. My Hue Go lamp goes outside on my patio ( when I sit in the hot tub) and I have since bought a Hue color bulb which I use in my bedroom. Soft pink is my favorite color, very romantic. I bought the Bloom but haven’t figured out how to use its features yet since I just opened the box. These items are really easy to use and clearly I am a 56-year-old amateur! So if I can use these things and have loads of fun I’m sure you’re much more technically savvy than I am and you’ll have a blast using them. Can’t wait to get the Hue strips and use them under my kitchen counters AND I just found out today that you can cut the strips which is marvelous and they also have extensions. That will be my next purchase. I’m buying these items one item at a time and it’s marvelous how they work together in sync. Also they have fan light bulbs but I’m a little disappointed that the fan light bulbs are not colored and that they only fit certain size fans. So make sure you bring your fan light bulb in to see if it fits because these are skinny nozzle fans that you screw in if you have a larger nozzle the fan bulbs won’t fit But the hue controller is fantastic and controls all of these devices. I totally recommend it -go for it! And it easily extends the Wi-Fi from inside my office outside onto the porch, into the kitchen, all over my house so it has excellent range on Wi-Fi. You don’t have to worry about whether it will reach far enough with the Wi-Fi. Love this item.

As with many of the trendy products these days, Philips gets a lot of geek right but misses one or two basics. For example, you can't set the lights to power up to the color of your choice. What could be more basic than turning on the lights? I think they expect you to leave them powered up 24/7, using the phone all the time (geez!) The initial color is a warm white like a light bulb from 20 years ago, so it's a very common color. But I prefer daylight white. On the positive side, a new interface was downloaded recently, and while I still haven't learned all the changes (geez!) it really does seem to be a big step up. The third-party add-ins (another trendy idea) don't bring much to the party for me. In particular I really didn't want to use my phone's microphone to drive the sound-responsive lights (why not bluetooth or a wired connection to avoid interference), but the music-responsive add-ins seem to be naive doohickies done by some non-audiophile developers. Bottom line: when I want daylight white I drag my phone out and run the app (geez!). And for movies, I really do like some funky green and red colors I've selected (I have four Hue bulbs). Sometimes I like to dim the LEDs while not necessarily doing much with the colors. And I set up a few "Scenes" (in the old interface I didn't even find out how for several weeks) and put shortcuts on my Android phone so that I just tap (yep, daylight white is one of them), including a scene where only the light near my media rack is turned on. Worth having, absolutely, but Philips, I want to select my own power on color (GEEZ!)

The Echo Dot is the beginning of a new way in which we live. Alexa provides us with weather, miscellaneous facts and even jokes. As time passes, there are more and more improvements made to the software, and she is able to add to her skills. Already we have added a smart light bulb to our house, which we use Alexa to control. No more walking thru a dark room to find the switch. I also use her to set an alarm for me in the morning. I don't fumble for the snooze button any longer. I just say, "Alexa, snooze for 10 minutes." I love not having to search for a cd. Just say, "Alexa, play Adele's greatest hits." The Dot has good sound, but if I want to move to another room, I can just use my Bluetooth wireless speaker and the Dot will play thru that. The Alexa app has additional skills you can add to your Dot. One particularly useful one is called My Buddy. In the event of an emergency, it allows the Dot to send a text and an email to a person you have specified. This can be great for older people. This is a cool product. The only reason I did not give it 5 stars is because there is a slight learning curve to figure out how to make it do all it can do. Also, when it occasionally falls offline, it can be a pain to get it reconnected.

Yay, I thought, another hub/router/switch added to my home network. One more thing that will take an hour to set up and two hours to reconnect when someone unplugs everything when the power goes out. The Phillips Hub set up so quickly and easily that I was sure I had made a mistake...and since set up, the power has gone out twice in my place and I never had to do anything to make it work right again. When you add a light fixture to the hub, it’s super easy. Open the app, select to add a device, press the big button on the hub and presto. Done. Love it.

If you plan on having a few to several dozen Hue bulbs, I give this 5 stars. If however, you plan to have more than 50 bulbs you may want to plan and rethink this investment. I have two floors with approximately 75 Hue bulbs and therefore required to have two Hue Bridges. Each bridge manages a maximum of 63 bulbs with problems starting around 50. Philips cheaped out when they could have supported more, especially at this price point. Second, the two bridges do not seamlessly interoperate with each other, a massive screwup on Philips part. I have to switch from reach hub to manage my bulbs..... insanely stupid. That said, if you can deal with the limitations, great. Otherwise, I suggest you rethink investing in Philips. I clearly made a terrible mistake.

The lights are great. The setup SEEMS simple. The native app to operate is abysmal!!!!! Before you buy do a search for "Ouch! The update failed to install. Please try again." That will take you several flame forums, some aimed at the developers who give you script/codes that YOU have to implement on the bridge. "Ouch"? Maybe if they didn't try being so familiar or cheeky and instead spent some effort to prove they are actually taking their task seriously it would have merited another star from my rating. Unless you can push an update from the 2.19 version you'll only have the function of turning the lights on and off, changing their colors and the lava effect. You won't have the option to automate/schedule, not in the manufacturer app at least.