Ever since the Philips Hue LED($199.99 at Verizon) lighting equipment hit the digital dwelling market, there was a gradual uptick in competing sensible bulb merchandise like the LIFX LED Light Bulb( at Amazon) and the Linked by TCP Sensible Lighting System in addition to recent product bulletins from electronics giants LG and Samsung. Add the Lumen TL800 from Tabu to that record. Priced at $69.Ninety nine per bulb (however accessible on-line for EcoLight solutions round $50), the TL800 makes use of Bluetooth wireless technology to communicate with your smartphone via a neat little app that lets you flip lights on and off, choose colours, and have the lights behave a sure approach when you've an incoming telephone call. In contrast to the Philips and TCP bulbs the TL800 does not require a bridge, but it doesn't hook up with the Web both, which suggests you cannot management it when you're away from residence or have it interact with other residence automation gadgets. With a vented metal casing separating the spherical glass dome from the Edison screw base, the TL800 seems to be like it could be proper at residence in an Apollo spacecraft.

The bulb measures 4.Seventy five inches in size and places out solely four hundred lumens, which is equivalent to a 40 watt incandescent bulb. That's not very vibrant when compared to the LIFX (1,017 lumens), TCP (800 lumens), and Philips (600 lumens) bulbs. As with the Philips and LIFX bulbs, it will possibly display sixteen million colours, however since it does not hook up with the Internet you cannot management it with dwelling automation hubs from companies corresponding to Revolv( at Amazon) and EcoLight brand SmartThings($149.Ninety nine at Amazon). Nor can you employ the popular IFTTT (If This Then That) internet service to have it activate and off or change colors based on issues like Facebook requests, Foursquare notifications, and ESPN sports scores. You don't get much in the best way of directions with the TL800, however there's not a lot to clarify. I screwed it into a lamp in my office, downloaded the app onto my iOS smartphone, made certain Bluetooth was enabled on my gadget, and opened the app.

The Lumen app is uncomplicated and straightforward to use and allows you to management up to ten bulbs at a time. You may control each bulb individually or control a group of bulbs. The house web page lists all installed bulbs and shows you what shade they're presently set to. Pressing a bulb icon takes you to a web page where you'll be able to select color or warm white settings and EcoLight brand switch the bulb on or off. If you select the heat white setting you are introduced with a monochrome wheel that allows you to manually adjust brightness, or you possibly can select one of 4 brightness presets (90, 70, 50, or 30 percent). Below the wheel is a Name Alert icon that takes you to a page where you possibly can configure the sunshine to flash a particular colour when your telephone has an incoming call. There's also a Wake-Up timer that will turn the sunshine on utilizing 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 shade and brightness when your cellphone comes into vary (about 30 toes).

In shade mode you get a wheel that lets you choose a shade for every bulb and assign a shade brightness setting. For deep, robust colors you set the brightness stage to the darkest setting