Ever because the Philips Hue LED($199.99 at Verizon) lighting equipment hit the digital home market, there has been a gradual uptick in competing smart bulb products like the LIFX LED Gentle Bulb( at Amazon) and the Connected by TCP Good Lighting System in addition to recent product announcements from electronics giants LG and Samsung. Add the Lumen TL800 from Tabu to that listing. Priced at $69.99 per bulb (however available online for around $50), the TL800 uses Bluetooth wireless know-how to communicate together with your smartphone via a neat little app that permits you to flip lights on and off, select colours, and long-life LED have the lights behave a certain means when you might have an incoming cellphone name. In contrast to the Philips and TCP bulbs the TL800 doesn't require a bridge, but it surely would not connect to the Internet either, which suggests you cannot control it when you're away from house or have it interact with other house automation units. With a vented metal casing separating the spherical glass dome from the Edison screw base, the TL800 seems to be like it would be proper at residence in an Apollo spacecraft.

The bulb measures 4.75 inches in size and puts out solely four hundred lumens, which is equivalent to a forty watt incandescent bulb. That is not very vivid when compared to the LIFX (1,017 lumens), TCP (800 lumens), and Philips (600 lumens) bulbs. As with the Philips and LIFX bulbs, it could display 16 million colours, but because it does not connect to the Web you can't control it with dwelling automation hubs from corporations such as Revolv( at Amazon) and SmartThings($149.99 at Amazon). Nor can you utilize the popular IFTTT (If This Then That) web service to have it activate and off or EcoLight outdoor change colours based on things like Facebook requests, Foursquare notifications, and ESPN sports activities scores. You don't get much in the way of directions with the TL800, however there's not much to elucidate. I screwed it right into a lamp in my office, downloaded the app onto my iOS smartphone, EcoLight energy made sure Bluetooth was enabled on my gadget, and opened the app.

The Lumen app is uncomplicated and easy to make use of and lets you control up to 10 bulbs at a time. You may control each bulb individually or control a gaggle of bulbs. The home page lists all installed bulbs and exhibits you what colour they're at the moment set to. Urgent a bulb icon takes you to a page the place you may select colour or heat white settings and turn the bulb on or off. Whenever you choose the heat white setting you're presented with a monochrome wheel that allows you to manually regulate brightness, or you can choose one of four brightness presets (90, 70, 50, or 30 p.c). Under the wheel is a Name Alert icon that takes you to a page the place you can configure the light to flash a selected shade when your telephone has an incoming call. There's additionally a Wake-Up timer that can turn the light on using a dim warm white setting that regularly gets brighter to create a sunrise effect, and a Proximity possibility that may have a mild activate to a preset colour and EcoLight outdoor brightness when your telephone comes into vary (about 30 toes).

In shade mode you get a wheel that lets you select a shade for every bulb and EcoLight assign a shade brightness setting. For deep, strong colors you set the brightness level to the darkest setting