Ever for the reason that Philips Hue LED bulbs for home($199.Ninety nine at Verizon) lighting kit hit the digital dwelling market, there has been a gentle uptick in competing smart bulb products like the LIFX LED Light Bulb( at Amazon) and the Linked by TCP Good Lighting System as well as latest 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 on-line for round $50), the TL800 uses Bluetooth wireless technology to communicate along with your smartphone via a neat little app that permits you to flip lights on and off, choose colors, and have the lights behave a certain manner when you've got an incoming telephone name. Not like the Philips and TCP bulbs the TL800 does not require a bridge, but it surely does not hook up with the Internet either, which suggests you can't control it when you're away from house or have it interact with other dwelling automation devices. With a vented metal casing separating the spherical glass dome from the Edison screw base, the TL800 appears to be like prefer it can be proper at house in an Apollo spacecraft.

The bulb measures 4.Seventy five inches in length and puts out only four hundred lumens, which is equivalent to a 40 watt incandescent bulb. That's not very bright when in comparison with the LIFX (1,017 lumens), TCP (800 lumens), and Philips (600 lumens) bulbs. As with the Philips and LIFX bulbs, it might probably display sixteen million colours, however since it does not connect to the Web you cannot management it with home automation hubs from firms similar to Revolv( at Amazon) and SmartThings($149.99 at Amazon). Nor can you use the popular IFTTT (If This Then That) web service to have it activate and off or change colours primarily based on things like Facebook requests, Foursquare notifications, and ESPN sports activities scores. You aren't getting a lot in the way of instructions with the TL800, however there's not a lot to explain. I screwed it right into a lamp in my workplace, downloaded the app onto my iOS smartphone, made sure Bluetooth was enabled on my system, EcoLight and opened the app.

The Lumen app is uncomplicated and easy to use and lets you management up to ten bulbs at a time. You may management each bulb individually or management a bunch of bulbs. The home web page lists all installed bulbs and exhibits you what shade they are presently set to. Urgent a bulb icon takes you to a web page where you'll be able to choose coloration or heat white settings and LED bulbs for home switch the bulb on or off. Once you choose the heat white setting you're offered with a monochrome wheel that permits you to manually modify brightness, LED bulbs for home or you possibly can select one of 4 brightness presets (90, 70, 50, or 30 percent). Under the wheel is a Call Alert icon that takes you to a page where you'll be able to configure the sunshine to flash a particular shade when your telephone has an incoming call. There's additionally a Wake-Up timer that can turn the sunshine on utilizing a dim heat white setting that steadily will get brighter to create a sunrise impact, and a Proximity choice that could have a mild turn on to a preset color and brightness when your phone comes into range (about 30 feet).

In shade mode you get a wheel that lets you select a coloration for every bulb and assign a colour brightness setting. For deep, robust colours you set the brightness degree to the darkest setting