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Philips Hue Gradient Signe Floor Lamp review: As cool as it is expensive

Philips Hue products have a reputation for being pricier than the competition, but there’s a reason for that: they’re some of the best Smart lights out there, with a fully featured app and a huge (and growing) ecosystem of lights to choose from. At 330, the Signe floor lamp is one of Hue’s most premium offerings, and it’s not an easy sell on utility alone. But if you’ve got the cash and you’re all about Hue, it’ll be a great addition to your Smart home.

Philips Hue Gradient Signe Floor Lamp

The Philips Hue Gradient Signe Floor Lamp offers all the color customization you could ask for, and the Hue app and ecosystem are about the best you’re gonna get in the Smart lighting world. At 330, it’s decidedly a luxury, but it’s an extremely cool one.

  • Integrations: Google Assistant, Alexa, HomeKit
  • Hub Required: No, but it works best with one
  • Music Reactive: Yes
  • Multicolor Capable: Yes
  • Color Range: 2000-6500K
  • Service Life: 25,000 hours
  • Environment: Indoor
  • Voltage: 24V
  • Type: Floor lamp
  • Connectivity: Bluetooth, Zigbee
  • Price: 330
  • Sleek design and solid build quality
  • Effectively limitless color combinations
  • Great app and ecosystem
  • Really expensive
  • Google Home integration could be better
  • Narrow base might be tricky on some carpet

Philips Hue Gradient Signe Floor Lamp: Design and hardware

The Signe floor lamp is a larger version of the Signe table lamp. It consists of a slender metal tube with a gradient LED strip running along one side and a cylindrical metal base with a power cable sticking out the bottom. The whole thing’s about four and a half feet tall, and there are no physical controls on the device. For such a large lamp, it’s got a very modern, almost brutalist look — if your decor leans more traditional, you might have trouble finding a spot for it. It’s available in black or white, plus an oak variant that adds a wood finish to the white model’s base.

The LEDs are meant to face the wall, bathing the surrounding area in soft, indirect light in any combination of colors you want. This kind of ambient lighting works best in rooms with walls that are a light, neutral color — you won’t want to put the Signe in a room painted purple. Against my light gray walls, the light the Signe produces is sufficient to light up a small room enough to read by, and colors come across clearly. Set to neutral white, at its peak, the Hue Signe floor lamp can put out 2,550 lumens, about equal to one 150-watt incandescent bulb.

Having used the similar but considerably less expensive Govee Lyra lamp, which ships in segments you have to assemble yourself, I was pleased to see the Signe arrives in one ready-to-go piece. That saves the hassle of having to put the thing together and makes for a sleeker look without any visible seams — both appreciated touches at this price point. Overall, it feels sturdy and not like it’s liable to break if you happen to tip it over.

On that note, my biggest complaint about Signe’s hardware is that its narrow base isn’t as weighty as I’d like, making standing it up straight on medium- or high-pile carpet a bit tricky. It’s possible with some cajoling, but a wider, heavier base would make things easier.

Philips Hue Gradient Signe Floor Lamp: App, ecosystem, and performance

The Signe floor lamp is controlled with the Philips Hue app. That means if you’ve got Hue lights already, the Signe is super simple to drop into your existing rooms and automations. I’ve been using mine in the bedroom, where I have it set to mimic the sunrise each morning — an increasingly useful feature as the actual sunrise creeps later and later into the day. It’s got a dedicated sunrise lighting style, which uses shades of blue, orange, and yellow to give the impression of the morning sky at dawn. But with enough fiddling, you could set the Signe to turn on to any combination of colors at whatever time you please.

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There are tons of pre-baked lighting “scenes” to choose from in the Hue app, each applying its own unique gradient of colors to Signe’s lighting strip (as well as any other color-capable Hue lights you may have in the same room). Call me boring, but I don’t get much use out of the more vibrant scenes containing bold purples, reds, or greens. So most of the time, I stick to the tried-and-true defaults category that sets lights to more standard lighting colors.

But the color options are fun for events or even just to mess around with. In addition to Hue’s ready-made color combos, you can set combinations of any three colors of your choosing. You also have the option to save your custom setups as new scenes to quickly reapply them on-demand or add them to your automations.

You can sync the Signe floor lamp with your PC or Mac to match the colors on your screen using Hue’s desktop sync app, or sync with your Spotify account for a light show synchronized with your music. The Signe is even compatible with the Hue Play HDMI Sync Box for matching the content on your TV — though if you’re looking mainly for that kind of functionality, something like the Hue Gradient Lightstrip will probably suit you better.

Hue plays nice with Google Assistant and Alexa, and once you link your Hue account to your voice assistant, you can turn the Signe floor lamp on and off, adjust its brightness, and even change its color by voice. Hue lights can also be added to routines in either ecosystem, but you won’t get the fine control of Hue’s in-house automations. Short of simply turning the Signe on or off, I’ve found it’s easiest to schedule what I want the lamp to do directly from the Hue app.

It’s not an indictment of Hue in particular, but I do wish controlling Smart lights with the Google Home app was a little less annoying. You can use Google’s app to adjust the Signe’s brightness and overall color, but there aren’t any options to trigger Hue’s lighting scenes on demand. And adding Smart lights to Assistant routines is a tedious process that involves too many steps (and a lot of checkboxes). Maybe that’ll improve in the upcoming Google Home update.

Philips Hue Gradient Signe Floor Lamp: Should you buy it?

There’s no way around it: the Philips Hue Signe floor lamp is expensive. As cool as it is, when you get right down to it, you’re paying 330 for a lamp. I’ve owned couches for less.

Major Smart Lighting Brands Ranked Worst To Best

Adding Smart lights is one of the easiest ways to start building a Smart home. They’re generally easy to set up and incorporate into your daily routines. There are plenty of things you should know about Smart bulbs before buying them, but one of the biggest is choosing your brand.

Of course, many people have multiple Smart lighting brands in their homes, but it’s easier if everything is the same brand. Then, if you want to use that brand’s proprietary app, everything you need is in one place for easy control. Plus, once you pick a reliable brand, choosing your Smart lighting products becomes immensely easier. Within a single brand, your options are more limited, which cuts down on your decision-making time.

This article ranks major Smart lighting brands from worst to best, but that doesn’t mean that the first couple of entries on our list are necessarily bad Smart lighting brands. Many of the lower-ranking Smart lighting brands are still excellent options — just not the best for most people.

Cync by GE

Thomas Edison formed the Edison General Electric Company in 1890, about 11 years after he invented the first commercial incandescent lamp made of Carbon Filament. Almost 100 years later, GE introduced the first energy-saving fluorescent bulb in 1974 and the Energy Smart LED bulbs in 2010. In 2015, the company launched C by GE as its first line of Smart lighting products, known today as Cync. In GE’s Smart product range, there are plugs, thermostats, sensors, light strips, and bulbs. You can choose between indoor and outdoor light strips, and a variety of Smart bulb shapes, sizes, and colors.

One of the most popular Cync products is the full-color Direct Connect Smart bulb, which is the equivalent of a 60W incandescent bulb, but it uses 84% less energy and lasts 15 times longer. This bulb, along with other Cync bulbs, works with Alexa and Google Assistant, doesn’t require a hub or bridge to use, and allows you to create custom schedules. You can also play around with settings in the Cync mobile app.

Cync Smart bulbs are inexpensive, but you get what you pay for — and that’s often a lack of customer support. Reddit users have complained that Cync by GE offers the worst user experience and that contacting Cync support leaves you feeling incredibly frustrated. The biggest complaints Cync by GE users seem to have is connectivity issues through Google Home and the Cync app.

Ring

The Ring brand is most well-known for its video doorbell and security camera options. The company started in 2012 with three engineers, one intern, and another team member, and its first product was the Doorbot, which was a Wi-Fi-enabled video doorbell. Among its Smart lighting options, you’ll find path lights, floodlights, spotlights, step lights, solar-powered wall lights, and Smart bulbs.

One of Ring’s most popular Smart bulbs is the A19 Smart LED Bulb, which was first introduced in the new Smart home gear Ring launched in 2020. It can shine up to 800 lumens of white light that’s equivalent to a 60W incandescent bulb. You can connect the bulb to the Ring Bridge, Echo Show 10, or Echo to enable customizable Smart controls within the Ring mobile app, available on both Android devices and iPhones.

Ring falls lower on the list of major Smart lighting brands because its Smart lights require the Ring Bridge to make them Smart. Without the Bridge, they only function as standard motion-sensing lights. Plus, although you can use Ring Smart bulbs with Google Assistant, there’s much more of a FOCUS on Alexa because Ring was bought by Amazon in February 2018. There are also pretty limited Smart lighting options right now. Ring offers no Smart LED strips and only one Smart bulb that’s dimmable, but can’t do color or variations of white.

WiZ

WiZ was founded in 2017, but the software team was formed in Hong Kong two years prior. In short, the company is an IoT platform for Smart lighting solutions, services, and software. By 2018, WiZ was doing so well that it was acquired by Signify and has its products in over 60 countries.

In the WiZ product range, you’ll find Smart bulbs, light strips, luminaires, outdoor lights, home monitoring devices, and various accessories. The A19 Full Color Bulb is by far one of the best products by WiZ, and it only costs 12.99 retail for a single bulb. You can choose between 16 million colors, or filter between warm and cool white light until you find the perfect lighting. With up to 800 lumens of brightness, the A19 bulb provides ample light, no matter which color you choose. You can control the bulb via the mobile app, available on Android and iOS, or with voice commands. The bulb has been upgraded in recent years.

WiZ is a great budget Smart lighting brand. The mobile app may occasionally present errors when trying to connect or fail to work when needed, but these issues seem to be getting less common. You also need to find Connected by WiZ products to be able to use them in the WiZ mobile app, or you’d have to have an additional hub app, like Google Home, to control all your devices from different brands.

Cree Lighting

Cree Lighting is a US-based manufacturer that consists of two companies merged together, including RUUD Lighting, founded in 1982, and Cree, Inc., founded in 1987. The company has always had a FOCUS on lighting products, launching the first mass-market LED exterior and interior commercial fixtures in 2007, the first mass-market LED light bulbs in 2013, and proprietary ConnectedMax Smart LED bulbs in 2020.

The company continues to sell a mix of traditional incandescent lighting and Smart lighting. You can find a ton of options for traditional indoor and outdoor lighting, like floodlights, path lights, downlights, candelabras, and general-purpose bulbs. All of Cree Lighting’s Smart options are in its ConnectedMax line, which includes LED strip lighting, full-color Smart bulbs, and neat-looking filament Smart bulbs.

The Smart bulb people would most likely invest in would be Cree Lighting’s full-color A19 bulb. It’s a 60-watt equivalent bulb with 800 lumens of brightness. It works with Alexa, Google Assistant, and Siri Shortcuts, and you don’t need a hub to set it up — only Bluetooth and Wi-Fi. You can control individual bulbs, create groups of multiple bulbs, and set up scenes, routines, and schedules to make your life easier.

Meross

Meross was founded in 2016 by a group of experts from multiple leading companies, including Microsoft, Cisco, MediaTek, and TP-Link. The company aims to make homes smarter in the easiest, most cost-effective way possible, and its current product catalog reflects that mission.

Through Meross, you can find Smart plugs, Smart lighting, Smart switches, Smart surge protectors, Smart garage door openers, Smart radiator thermostats, and more. Diving more into Meross’ Smart lighting specifically, the company offers Smart LED bulbs in both color and all-white versions, Smart light strips, and Smart table lamps. All Meross products are compatible with Apple HomeKit, Amazon Alexa, Google Home, and Samsung SmartThings.

One of the company’s most popular products is the Smart Multicolor LED bulb. You can control it via voice commands through any of the platforms mentioned above, or use the mobile app on Android or iOS devices. You don’t need a hub; it simply works with 2.4 GHz Wi-Fi bands. It has equivalent brightness to a 60W incandescent bulb, and you can swap between warm and cool whites, as well as multiple colors. Then, you can set schedules and timers to help automate the lights and incorporate them into your daily routines. Meross has a wide selection of products, but the company isn’t as well-known as other brands. That said, Meross customers seem to be generally happy with the product, and the company offers many unique Smart lighting options, like its table lamps.

Nanoleaf

Nanoleaf was formed by three University of Toronto graduates in 2012, with the goal of becoming a pioneer in the Smart lighting industry. With how popular Nanoleaf products are today, it’s safe to say they succeeded! Today, Nanoleaf has five offices across the world in Toronto, Shenzhen, Paris, Hong Kong, and the Philippines. There are over 150 employees, 13 unique products and counting sold in over 100 countries, and over one million Nanoleaf app users on Android and iOS devices.

Among Nanoleaf’s Smart lighting options, you’ll see Smart bulbs, but they don’t look like traditional Smart bulbs. Instead, they’re geometric, with little hexagons scattered all over the bulb surface. Then, you’ll also find Smart light strips and uniquely titled product categories, including Lines, Shapes, Elements, Canvas, and Skylight, though Skylight products aren’t released just yet.

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The product titles are indicative of what they are, with Nanoleaf Lines consisting of multiple lined lights, Shapes including square, triangle, or mini triangle Smart lights, and Elements looking like an element of nature: wood. Nanoleaf Canvas lights look like a piece of artwork on the wall, with smoothed edges like an actual painted canvas. The Skylight product isn’t released yet, but it’ll be an advanced Smart ceiling light fixture that resembles modular squares. The company takes the convenience of traditional Smart lighting and puts an aesthetically pleasing twist on it so that you don’t have a “boring” Smart home.

Govee

Similar to Nanoleaf, Govee is known for its uniquely-shaped Smart lighting products, as well as a plethora of other Smart products. The company was founded in 2017 and has quickly become a leading name in the Smart home tech industry. Govee currently has over 12 million registered app users across Android and iOS devices.

Govee offers Smart appliances, like sensors, circulator fans, purifiers, humidifiers, and space heaters, but the company is most well-known for its Smart lighting. You can find string lights, ground lights, floodlights, spotlights, and strip lights for the outdoors. Then, for indoor use, Govee has light bars for your TV or computer monitor, backlighting, lamps, night lights, strip lights, wall lights, neon rope lights, and of course, Smart bulbs.

Though all of Govee’s products are pretty popular, the company does an excellent job with Smart backlighting for TVs and monitors. The DreamView T1 TV backlight, for example, creates an immersive light show around your TV that mimics what’s on your screen. Govee’s Envisual camera can recognize and capture the colors on your TV screen, and then apply them to the backlights automatically. The backlights can be controlled via the mobile app or through voice commands, and there are 12 unique Scene modes to try out. If Govee’s products fit your style, they’re reliable and overall a great choice.

Sengled

Sengled is a global leader in Smart lighting that’s currently headquartered in Alpharetta, GA. The company released its first Smart speaker bulb in 2012 and Sengled’s Smart lighting products can connect through Bluetooth Mesh, Wi-Fi, or Zigbee, and can be controlled with voice commands through Alexa, Google Assistant, or Apple HomeKit. There’s quite a variety of Smart bulbs through Sengled, including soft white bulbs, multicolor bulbs, tunable white bulbs, daylight bulbs, and extra bright options for daylight and soft white bulbs. Then, Sengled offers light strips with just LED lights, with audio sync, or with video sync technology.

You can also buy accessories that enhance the Smart lighting experience, including a Smart hub, Smart light switches, motion sensors, and Smart plugs. Or, you can opt for one of Sengled’s starter kits, which includes a Zigbee Smart hub and lights. Any of these starter kits will deck your home out with Smart lighting.

Philips Cosmos 5W Rechargable Desk Table lamp

In 2020, Sengled introduced the Smart LED Edison Filament Bulb, which combines a very old-school design with modern Smart lighting technology. It’s a clear bulb with a visible filament at a 2100K color temperature. Or, you could try out a more modern-looking option with Sengled’s Multicolor A19 bulb, which can change between soft white, bright daylight, or 16 million different colors. Some Sengled bulbs may require a hub to take advantage of all the available Smart features, but it’s nice to have the hub when your entire home is equipped with Smart lights.

Wyze

Wyze was founded in Seattle by three former Amazon employees, with the mission to make great technology accessible to everyone. The company’s first product, the Wyze Cam, launched at only 19.99, which was an insanely low price at the time compared to other in-home security cameras. Wyze sold 1 million units in a single year and has since become one of the best budget-friendly Smart home companies.

In addition to indoor security cameras, Wyze offers outdoor cameras, video doorbells, watches, Smart scales, Smart thermostats, vacuums, motion sensors, keypads, and plenty of Smart lighting options. The Wyze Smart bulb comes in a simple white option as well as a full-color option, and then there’s a regular and a pro version of Wyze’s light strip. The setup process is simple and fast, the Wyze app worked flawlessly, and the overall quality of the bulb was so worth it for the cheap price. Wyze is an incredibly affordable Smart lighting brand that doesn’t skimp on product quality. The company may not offer anything fancy, like a table lamp or an oddly shaped wall light, but they do have Smart bulbs in color and white variations and strip lights for ambient lighting options.

TP-Link

TP-Link was founded in 1996 and has provided countless networking devices and accessories that help people live more efficient everyday lives. In terms of modern Smart lighting, TP-Link has two well-known brands: Kasa Smart and Tapo. Kasa is the first Smart brand from TP-Link and it’s well-established, with multicolor bulbs, dimmable white bulbs, and light strips. You can practically build an entire Smart home ecosystem just from Kasa products. Then, Tapo is the newest Smart brand from TP-Link, and it currently features both multicolor and white Smart bulbs and light strips.

The biggest difference between Kasa Smart and Tapo is that Kasa devices connect solely over Wi-Fi, whereas Tapo devices can connect over Wi-Fi or over a different frequency that helps users free up Wi-Fi space. TP-Link didn’t engineer Kasa Smart and Tapo devices to communicate with each other, but the company says that it doesn’t plan to discontinue either line of products.

A 4-pack of Tapo multicolor Smart bulbs is only 29.99, making these pretty accessible products. They work with Google Assistant and Alexa, and allow you to create schedules with them, control dimness, and customize the color — all without requiring a hub. Meanwhile, a 2-pack of Kasa Smart bulbs retails for 24.99 and functions pretty similarly to the Tapo bulbs.

LIFX

Founded in 2012, LIFX makes Smart lights for every occasion, including practical lighting for work, fun lights for personal use, and even lights that could eliminate bacteria. LIFX has employees spread all over the world, from the United States to Australia to Ireland and more. LIFX offers quite a few Smart lighting products, including downlights, beam kits, light strips, Smart switches with two or four buttons, and Smart bulbs of various shapes, sizes, and colors. LIFX added support for Apple HomeKit to its Smart bulbs in 2017, making the bulbs available for users on almost all Smart home platforms. Then, in 2020, LIFX introduced a new mobile app — available on both Android and iOS — and some cool Edison-style filament Smart bulbs.

One of LIFX’s best-selling products is the Color E26 bulb, which offers billions of colors to choose from, as well as a wide range of whites, from warm to cool. The Color E26 bulb is also the brightest offering from LIFX, with 1100 lumens of brightness. It’s long-lasting, easy to set up, and doesn’t require a bridge or a hub to work, just plain old Wi-Fi. You can set schedules, instruct your lights to follow the day’s natural light, and control everything from the app or through voice commands. Though LIFX’s range of products is limited to Smart bulbs, light strips, and light switches, the products are of top-notch quality.

Philips Hue

Philips has been around since 1891, and the company has created a wide range of products, with the Philips Hue line covering everything related to Smart lighting. The Philips brand is currently licensed to Signify, a world leader in lighting that also acquired WiZ Smart lighting products. In the Philips Hue line, you can find lamps, luminaires, bulbs, and light strips for both professional and personal use.

There are also Philips Hue starter kits, which come with a Hue bridge and either two or four bulbs, depending on your needs. The pack of two or four bulbs can be either color ambiance bulbs or tunable white bulbs. You can also find bundled products to help you save money, as Philips Hue Smart lighting products can get a bit expensive. In the most recent 2022 range, Philips Hue added dramatic light guide bulbs and light strips for PC gamers. The light strips are flexible and affixed to the back of your monitor. They can show different zones of color along the strip and sync the ambient glow of the strip to whatever’s on your screen at any given moment.

Philips Hue is by far the best major Smart lighting brand you can invest in today. It’s more expensive than other options but for good reason. Philips Hue Smart lights are friendly with other platforms, and most users never have any issues with connectivity, customer service, or functionality.

Philips Hue Go portable table lamp review

When we think of Smart table lamps, they’re often modern or futuristic in style. Instead, the Philips Hue Go portable table lamp offers a unique yet familiar approach to Smart lighting, making it an excellent entry point for those just starting on their Smart home journey. Plus, it can be used indoors and outdoors, and delivers fantastic battery life.

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Pros

  • Stylish, svelte design
  • Lightweight and easy to move
  • Suitable for indoor and outdoor use

Cons

  • – Lamp wobbles when docked to charge
  • – for ambiance than lighting a room
  • – White colorway comes with a black charging base

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One-minute review

Philips Hue is famed for making some of the best Smart lights, offering the widest ranges of color shades (16 million) in a host of shapes and sizes. With product lines such as Hue Go, the brand has been moving the dial beyond individual bulbs to other lighting form factors – including its latest creation, the Hue Go portable table lamp.

Previously, models such as the spotlight-shaped Philips Hue Go 2 and the Philips Hue Gradient Signe table lamp have sported wonderful standout designs, but haven’t necessarily had the traditional homely feel you might be looking for.

The Hue Go portable table lamp takes its design cues from traditional bedside table lamps, with a round base plate and central column supporting its lamp shade top. Available in black and white metal, the lamp makes for a fetching and chic piece on your side table, and comes with a hand grip in situ for moving the lamp from room to room. It’s lightweight at 975g and can be carried with ease around the home – and outside, thanks to its IP54 dust and water protection.

Petite at 35 x 14.2 x 14.2cm (h x w x d), the Philips Hue Go portable table lamp is clearly designed with ambiance in mind, rather than lighting up a whole room. The lamp “shade” is purely aesthetic – the round light plate is located on the underside of the lamp shade, meaning the light splays out downwards as it would on a standard lamp without the need of a shade to diffuse the glaring light of standard light bulbs. The light plate itself measures only 25cm high, which proved a little short for use as a reading lamp unless it’s on near-full brightness, which maxes out at 530 lumens.

The top of the lamp is fully covered, and home to a button to turn the device on and cycle through the eight color hues available. This button placement is far better than the Hue Go 2, where it was perplexingly positioned on the underside of the lamp; but this does come at the expense of having any light spray from the top of the shade as you might expect from a traditional table lamp. Personally, I didn’t mind this so much, preferring to use the lamp for mood lighting; but this does limit its use somewhat.

The lamp charges on a small wired dock – and, fully charged, the battery can last up to 48 hours, depending on the hue selected. This is almost double the lifespan we saw in the Philips Hue Go 2. On test, more vibrant hues at full brightness saw it last just under 6 hours, while dimmer and less intense settings such as the flickering Cosy Candle scene saw it last close to 48 hours. One of my greatest gripes with Philips Hue lights is that there’s no way to determine the level of battery remaining, but the manufacturers suggest it takes 3-4 hours to fully charge.

The black charging dock itself is the source of two of my biggest complaints with the Philips Hue Go portable table lamp. Although I tested the black lamp, I’ve seen customer feedback online stating that the base plate for the white colorway is also black. This feels like an oversight from a company as design and aesthetic-intensive as Philips Hue.

Second, the lamp isn’t terribly secure on its base. A decisive knock will see it fall off its dock, and even when placed on a table, vibrations through the floor as you walk around your home can cause the lamp to teeter, flickering the light on and off in the process.

You can opt to exclusively use the preset hues on the lamp (my personal favorites are Forest Green and Cosy Candle), but as with all of the best Smart lights, there’s no need to fork out for one of the best Smart switches to remotely control the Hue Go portable table lamp and unlock its true potential. Simply download the app and, where relevant, add the device to your preferred Smart home ecosystem, and you’re good to go.

As with all Philips Hue lights, it’s spectacularly easy to connect the table lamp to the app with either a preinstalled Philips Hue Bridge, which allows for up to 50 devices, or Bluetooth, which allows for up to 10. Once that’s done, you unleash a whole new world of potential for your portable table lamp. You can either use the color wheel to choose from 16 million shades, use some of the many ready-to-go “scenes” (multiple themed colors through which the light will cycle) in Philips Hue’s library, or even create your own custom scenes using the color wheel or your favorite photos.

All in all, the Philips Hue Go portable table lamp is a slightly flawed yet fantastic addition to the Philips Hue Go lineup. It could certainly do with being a little taller and a little brighter to meet the expectations a user would have of a regular table lamp, and it feels like Philips Hue fell at the last hurdle when it comes to the wobbly, sometimes mismatched charging base.

Still, it’s the only Smart table lamp I can think of to take its design cues from the more familiar, traditional table lamp form factor, and as a first attempt it works fantastically well. I found the lamp to be really useful, too. Its battery life is truly impressive, and its portability came in very handy when I was looking in dark cupboards, crawling around under my desk trying to fix my PC, and enjoying company on my balcony.

It also feels like a great entry point for newbies to start building their first Smart home. Its inoffensive design, user-friendly app, and simple setup make for the perfect companion.

PHILIPS DESK LAMP UNBOXING NEW YEAR GIFT FROM PARENTS|

Philips Hue Go portable table lamp review: Price and availability

The Philips Hue Go portable table lamp is available for 159.99 / £139.99 directly from the Philips Hue US and Philips Hue UK websites and online retailers such as Amazon. The main body is available in two colors, each with two different hand grip options; black with either a dark grey or orange grip and white with either sage green or teal. The charge plate for both colorways is black.

While the light can be easily set up using Bluetooth, you might want to opt to connect more devices and use the Philips Hue Bridge, which is sold separately for 59.99 / £49.99.

Philips table lamp

Credit: Philips Hue

Check out some of Bloom’s key specs:

  • Casts dimmable light in white, or millions of colors
  • Control up to 10 lights via Bluetooth app, including schedules and routines
  • Lifetime up to 25,000 hours
  • 4.96-inches wide x 3.89-inches tall, weighs 1 pound
  • Retails for 69.99

If you noticed the asterisk on the second thing on the list, that’s because it’s only Bluetooth compatible right out of the box. If you want to add additional Smart control, such as Wi-Fi connectivity and the ability to use it with Amazon Alexa or Google Assistant, you’ll need the optional Hue Smart Hub/Bridge that costs nearly as much as the lamp itself: 59.99.

See just how bright this lamp is in News Director Ben’s review on Kim’s show:

My personal experience with Smart lighting began a few years ago by adding Smart plugs and wall switches to set routines and schedules for regular ol’ bulbs and fixtures. Over the past year or so, I’ve branched out into different lighting like actual Smart bulbs and LED light strips.

Philips Hue sent me the Bloom lamp and Bridge to review, and it’s my first experience with any of the company’s products. Looking at the size of the box, you might think it packs a larger lamp. As you can see, it’s fairly compact.

Instead of setting it up via Bluetooth only, I added the Hue Smart Hub for Wi-Fi connectivity. I plugged in the lamp and hub, then downloaded the official Philips Hue app (iOS version here and Android here).

After a firmware update, I had the app scan for the Hub, which it found almost immediately. Once connected, it was just as easy to add the Bloom lamp along with a custom name and assigning which room it was located in.

From there, you can fully operate the lamp from the app, turning it on or off, choosing color, brightness, setting routines and adding scenes using Hue’s gallery or creating your own. It was more full-featured than any other similar app I’ve used by lesser-known brands.

I also enabled Out of home control through the app, which, as the name suggests, lets me control the light while away from home. I had to create a Philips Hue account to activate that feature, which was also a very quick process.

Custom routines with Alexa

Once that step was complete, I opened the Alexa app and searched for the Philips Hue Skill and linked the accounts. That allowed me to add the Bloom lamp to an existing Routine in the Alexa app. Now one command controls the existing lights in that room and the Bloom.

I also set up a specific routine for the Bloom alone to illuminate the media room in low light when watching a movie on the projector. Again, easy to do.

Placement options

Since this lamp is made for indirect lighting, don’t just plop it down on the nearest end table — because it can get bright. Pick a place where an accent light would work well or behind a TV.

Because of all the options, you don’t even have to limit it to a living room or den. Try it out in the kitchen or dining room, or maybe it’ll work best in a bedroom. It really depends on how you want to use it, which can include ambient lighting, entertainment or both.

While I knew exactly which room I would place the lamp in, I struggled with deciding on an exact location. You can’t exactly place the Bloom behind a projector screen that’s attached to the wall.

I tried the lamp in a couple of different corners of the room and found a spot that worked really well in a particularly dark area. Adjusting the color temperature was easy, and even the brightest setting wasn’t over-the-top bright.

Because it’s compact and so easy to move, I might just change my mind — and that’s very easy to do with this lamp.

Verdict: Is the Philips Hue Bloom table lamp worth it?

For a relatively unique Smart light, 70 isn’t unreasonable. But if that’s all you’re willing to spend, be prepared to use the Bluetooth-only features. You’ll need to be in close proximity of the Bloom to control it with the app in that case.

While I’ve historically shopped budget Smart lighting, this lamp’s build and the app’s quality have me second-guessing that approach. Sometimes, you really do get what you pay for.