Philips Hue has take the covers off a suite of new smart lights, ranging from a new portable smart lamp for indoor and outdoor use, to a new range of lights designed to give users another level of smart lighting customization.
For people who like to keep smart lighting more low-key and simple, there’s the new Philips Hue Go portable table lamp.
With 48 hours of battery life and water and dust resistance, the new Hue Go portable table lamp has been designed for indoor and outdoor use. As an added bonus, it can be charged wirelessly using the included charging base, which is a neat touch.
We can imagine this being a hit with people who like to enjoy drinks outside on a patio or in a garden on a warm night once the sun has set. Sadly, the lamp is set to arrive at the “end of Summer” for a price of $159/£129, so it could miss some of the warmer weeks.
Philips Hue Perifo aims to give you more smart light customization
The new Philips Hue Perifo track lighting range is centered around individual rails that make up fully customizable tracks of lighting to cover a room or even a home.
Rather than provide a string of lights or single units of light tubes, the Perifo range lets you build what's effectively a rig of smart lights, from color-capable spotlights, pendants, light bars and light tubes, all in a single Perifo track.
With this setup you can then tailor the lighting to suit the mood of a room where the Perifo track is set up. For example, you could have a cool blue light bar shining down on a drinks cabinet, while a warm Hue bulb hovers over a desk or kitchen table at the same time.
“You choose the layout and length of the track and what lights to include to get full control over the way you light your home. The track can be attached to the wall or ceiling and connected to a standard outlet or existing wires using the included power supply unit,” Philips Hue explained. “Then the real fun begins as you click your choice of smart lights into the track and position them exactly how you want.”
With prices starting from £16.99 for Perifo connectors and going up to £259.99 for certain track lights (no world on U.S. prices yet), there’s a good deal of scope to the type of lights and look you can go for with Perifo.
For extra control over Philips Hue smart lights, there's the new $49/£44 Hue Tap dial switch. This four-button unit can be set to control the smart lights of up to three rooms or zones in a smart home, all from a few taps.
And the dial function naturally acts as a dimmer. You can think of the Hue Tap dial as a form of physical manifestation of the Philips Hue app. Available in a matte design in black or white, it should be an unobtrusive smart lighting controller to have around your home.
Further building on its smart light functionality, Philips Hue has the Sunrise wake-up style, which uses one or more Hue smart lights to simulate the color and tone of a rising sun, providing users with “a relaxing wake-up call in the morning or at any time of day.”
“The Sunrise wake-up style can be found in the Philips Hue app under the Wake up Automations Tab for Hue Bridge users and the Routines Tab for Bluetooth users,” the company explained. “The wake-up style can be customized for duration and time of day. Users of the existing wake-up style — now called Fade to Bright — can upgrade their wake-up experience by simply selecting Sunrise from the edit screen of the Automation.”
Sun in your room
This new lighting style will apparently work particularly well with the new Philips Hue Signe gradient lamp in oak. Priced at £199 and $349/£299 for the table and floor version respectively, this new lamp takes the Hue Signe design and gives it a natural wood-toned base.
In short, Philips Hue’s new products aim to bring smart lights into more areas of your home, while giving you more flexibility over their layout, aesthetic and control. We’ll need to test these products to see if Philips is onto a winner here. But given Philips has produced some the best smart lights, we have high hopes here.
If you are at a loss of where to start with smart lighting, we have a guide on Philips Hue lights as well as an exploration of the 9 things you never knew you could do with smart lights. Also read about how this clever $13 product just saved my Philips Hue lights.
