Ever since the Philips Hue LED($199.Ninety nine at Verizon) lighting kit hit the digital home market, there was a gradual uptick in competing good bulb merchandise just like the LIFX LED Mild Bulb( at Amazon) and the Related by TCP Sensible Lighting System in addition to current product announcements from electronics giants LG and Samsung. Add the Lumen TL800 from Tabu to that checklist. Priced at $69.99 per bulb (however available online for around $50), the TL800 makes use of Bluetooth wireless know-how to communicate together with your smartphone via a neat little app that allows you to flip lights on and off, select colours, and EcoLight products have the lights behave a certain way when you've an incoming cellphone call. Not like the Philips and TCP bulbs the TL800 does not require a bridge, however it doesn't connect to the Internet either, which suggests you cannot control it when you are away from home or have it work together with other residence automation units. With a vented steel casing separating the spherical glass dome from the Edison screw base, the TL800 seems like it would be right at dwelling in an Apollo spacecraft.

The bulb measures 4.Seventy five inches in size and places out solely four hundred lumens, which is equal to a forty watt incandescent bulb. That's not very brilliant when compared to the LIFX (1,017 lumens), TCP (800 lumens), and Philips (600 lumens) bulbs. As with the Philips and EcoLight products LIFX bulbs, EcoLight smart bulbs it could show 16 million colours, but since it doesn't connect to the Internet you cannot control it with house automation hubs from companies comparable to Revolv( at Amazon) and SmartThings($149.Ninety nine at Amazon). Nor EcoLight solutions can you utilize the favored IFTTT (If This Then That) internet service to have it activate and off or change colours based mostly on things like Fb requests, Foursquare notifications, and ESPN sports activities scores. You aren't getting a lot in the way in which of instructions with the TL800, but there's not much to clarify. I screwed it into a lamp in my workplace, downloaded the app onto my iOS smartphone, made positive Bluetooth was enabled on my system, and opened the app.

The Lumen app is uncomplicated and simple to make use of and energy-efficient bulbs lets you control up to ten bulbs at a time. You'll be able to management every bulb individually or control a gaggle of bulbs. The house page lists all installed bulbs and shows you what colour they're at present set to. Urgent a bulb icon takes you to a web page where you can select coloration or heat white settings and switch the bulb on or off. While you choose the heat white setting you're introduced with a monochrome wheel that permits you to manually alter brightness, or you can choose one of 4 brightness presets (90, 70, 50, or 30 %). Under the wheel is a Call Alert icon that takes you to a web page where you may configure the light to flash a specific color when your telephone has an incoming call. There's also a Wake-Up timer that will flip the light on using a dim warm white setting that progressively gets brighter to create a sunrise impact, and a Proximity option that could have a gentle turn on to a preset colour and brightness when your cellphone comes into vary (about 30 toes).

In shade mode you get a wheel that lets you choose a colour for EcoLight brand each bulb and assign a coloration brightness setting. For deep, strong colours you set the brightness stage to the darkest setting