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Buying Smart Light Bulbs for the First Time? Here’s What You Need to Know

The first thing to know is that, compared to other smart home tech, smart light bulbs are simple. They’re almost exactly the same as conventional LED bulbs, but with a whole host of added benefits.

The Advantages of a Smart Bulb

You can do a host of other neat things with smart light bulbs that you simply can’t conventional LED bulbs, too. Most of them have to do with control.

Remote control: You can turn smart lights on or off even if you’re not home. All you need to do is have your smartphone connected to Wi-Fi or LTE, and a compatible smart home app at the ready.

Create schedules: You don’t need to turn your lights on or off manually. With schedules you can set them to turn off or on (or otherwise change their settings, at a certain time every day or night. If you have multiple smart lights you can have them all set to the same or different schedules, too.

Create scenes: A “scene” or “room” in the context of a smart home is a group of devices all working together. For example, you can group the three smart light bulbs that are located in your bedroom together, name them “Bedroom,” and then turn them all on or off with a single voice command: “Hey Google, turn off bedroom lights.”

Brightness control: Not every smart light bulb is dimmable, but many are. Dimmable smart light bulbs are neat because you can adjust the brightness without having to adjust a physical dimmer. You can adjust it via an app or using voice commands.

Energy efficient: The vast majority of modern light bulbs are LEDs, and that includes most smart light bulbs. They’re naturally more energy-efficient than traditional incandescent bulbs, but the fact that they’re smart means you can always check on them; if you’ve left a light on by accident, you can turn it off from anywhere you have a Wi-Fi or LTE connection.

What to Look Out For

There are many different smart light bulbs that you can choose from in 2020. Not all of them work the same way or have the same capabilities, however. Here are some common questions to ask when considering your choice.

Does it need a hub? Some smart lights connect directly to your home’s Wi-Fi network so  you can easily control them straight from your smartphone or with a voice assistant. Others, require an extra piece of hardware, like a hub or a bridge, to do the exact same thing. Knowing if the smart lights will need extra hardware, which also adds an extra expense, is one of the most important things before investing in smart lights.

Is it compatible with your other gear? The other big important thing to consider before buying a smart light bulb is knowing whether it will work with your home’s smart ecosystem. Not every smart light is compatible with Amazon’s Alexa, Apple’s HomeKit, the Google Assistant or IFTTT, so you need to check beforehand.

What do you want for light color and temperature: If you’re willing to spend a little more, you can buy smart lights that have various colors and temperature effects. For instance, Philips Hue’s White And Color Ambiance smart bulbs can shine in millions of different colors and various shades of white light. These smart lights can also adjust the temperature of the light throughout the day, which can help you better wake up or fall asleep.

Smart Lights or Smart Switches/Outlets: Which to Choose?

Smart lights are great smart home products but they aren’t great in every scenario. For example, an area in your home that has multiple lights controlled by a single light switch probably isn’t a great situation for smart lights. A better solution for such a scene, like a large family room with lots of overhead lighting, would be to buy a smart switch instead, such as the Wemo Light Switch, instead.

Smart switches are generally a little cheaper and can be used to control the “dumb” lights that you already have. This also means that you can use smart switches to control any light bulb. On the downside, smart switches usually require more installation — typically some light wire-work — and they can’t be used to create scenes. While most smart light switches are able to dim the lights, they definitely can’t adjust the color or temperature like you’re able to with a lot of smart light bulbs.

The Best Smart Bulbs You Can Buy Right Now

Philips Hue White

Best Starter Bulbs: Philips Hue makes the most popular smart bulbs. The company’s “White” smart bulbs can’t produce the many shades of color as the “White and Color Ambiance” smart bulbs, but they’re cheaper, still dimmable and work in much the same way.

Compatibility: Amazon Alexa, Google Assistant
Smart Hub? Optional

Philips Hue White and Color Ambiance

Best Multi-Color Bulbs: These are the best option for people who really want to play around with all the customization options smart bulbs have to offer. Like the company’s “White” bulbs, they work with pretty much smart home ecosystem and you can control them with your voice. The big upside with them is that, via the app, you can adjust the smart lights to change to one of 16 million colors and shades of white. The downside is that you need to use the Hue smart hub (included in the starter pack) to get the most out of them.

Compatibility: Apple HomeKit, Amazon Alexa, Google Assistant, Samsung SmartThings
Smart Hub? Yes

Wyze Bulb

Best Budget Bulbs: At just $8 a piece and even cheaper in packs, you’re not going to find a more affordable smart bulb than the Wyze Bulb. And it’s actually pretty versatile to boot. It’s compatible with both Amazon’s and Google’s smart speakers. You can adjust its brightness and color temperatures (from warm to cool). And if you use Wyze’s other smart home products, you can have the Wyze Bulbs perform tricks like lighting up when certain sensors are triggered, like when motion is detected by a Wyze Cam.

Compatibility: Amazon Alexa, Google Assistant, IFTTT
Smart Hub? No

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Ikea Tradfri

Best Decorative Bulbs: Ikea’s first smart filament light bulb is beautiful, dimmable and relatively affordable. Its tinted glass helps create a warm, moody light. The only downside is that you’ll need to buy a smart hub, the Tradfri gateway ($35), to get the most out of it, such as the ability to control with voice controls or work with Ikea’s ecosystem of smart home products (consisting of motion sensors, LED light bulbs and some light panels).

Compatibility: Amazon Alexa, Google Assistant and Apple HomeKit)
Smart Hub? Yes
Note: Purchasing products through our links may earn us a portion of the sale, which supports our editorial team’s mission. Learn more here.

Sonos Beam Review: The Perfect Entry-Level Soundbar, for Most People

The Sonos Beam ($399) is the company’s newest soundbar that, similar to the Playbase ($699) and the Playbar ($699) that came before it, integrates your TV with your existing Sonos speakers. If you have a multi-room setup you can play the TV’s audio throughout your whole house, or you can configure your other Sonos speakers as satellites and/or rear channels and thus have a complete Sonos surround sound system.

That said, the Sonos Beam is much more than a smaller, more affordable version of those other soundbars. It’s a smart speaker with Alexa built-in, like the Sonos One, so you can ask Alexa to play music or control your smart home devices. And since it’s connected to your TV, you can use your voice to control your TV, too, which is a first for Sonos. For TV control, the Sonos Beam will work best for those with an Amazon Fire TV (or a TV with an Amazon Fire TV dongle), allowing you to ask Alexa to turn on the TV and even go to specific shows or channels. Also, unlike Sonos’s larger soundbars, the Sonos Beam can be either wall mounted or left to rest on your media console. (The Playbase needs to rest under your TV while the Playbar is designed to be wall mounted.)

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The Good: The great thing about any Sonos speaker, other than its sound quality, is that it comes with great software and an intuitive companion app — and the Sonos Beam is no different. You just plug the soundbar in, and then the app walks you through how to correctly connect it to your TV. The app also tunes the soundbar so that it’s optimized for your room, using its Trueplay tuning software, same as other Sonos speakers. If you own an Amazon Fire TV (or dongle), the Sonos Beam will be able to control your television almost completely. It plugs into to your TV through HDMI ARC port and it supports CEC, so you can use your TV’s remote to adjust the volume if you don’t feel like asking Alexa.

One of the most intriguing aspects of the Sonos Beam is that Sonos promises that it will eventually support all major virtual assistants, including Alexa (built-in), Siri (mid-July) and Google Assistant (by end of 2018). Not only that, but the Sonos Beam promises “cross-platform voice control,” meaning, as it pertains to music streaming, you’ll be able to ask Siri to play a song, then ask Alexa what song was playing. (This is an example that Antoine Leblond, Sonos’s VP of software, showed off at the Sonos Beam’s launch event in early June). You’ll be able to do other things like this eventually, but the conditions need to be perfect for it to work — certain virtual assistants won’t work with certain streaming services, for example. These cross-platform voice controls aren’t available at launch, so I wasn’t able to test them, but knowing they’re coming is a good thing. (It makes the product “future proof.”)

Who They’re For: At launch, there are two ways of looking at the Sonos Beam. Either 1. you’re buying it because you have other Sonos speakers and you want to integrate your TV into the mix, or 2. you want one smart speaker to rule your home — it can greatly improve the sound of your TV while also being a darn good speaker for streaming music. In the latter instance, the Sonos Beam is effectively taking the place of any quality sounding smart speaker, like the Google Home Max or Apple’s HomePod.

Watch Out For: The Sonos Beam is a plug-and-play, entry-level speaker that’s designed to work well with other Sonos speakers, but if you have a home entertainment system that includes an A/V receiver and non-Sonos satellite speakers, this is probably not the soundbar for you. (You could integrate them all with a Sonos Connect:AMP, but that gets messy and expensive.) If you don’t have an Amazon Fire TV, you won’t be able to control your TV with Alexa as completely as you might expect. And if you use your TV’s optical port instead its HDMI-ARC port, you won’t be able to turn the TV completely on/off with Alexa. Even though the Sonos Beam sounds very good with its wide stereo separation, it won’t sound as immersive as other soundbars with Dolby Atmos or DTS Virtual:X that creates three-dimensional sound using virtual height channels.

Alternatives: The Playbar ($699) and Playbase ($699) are the two other soundbars that Sonos makes. Both are louder than Sound Beam and probably better options for larger rooms. The main difference, other than size and cost, is that neither of those soundbars is a smart speaker that’s integrated with a virtual assistant: you can’t summon music or you control your TV (in any capacity) with your voice.

If you’re just looking for a soundbar that doesn’t need to sync with other Sonos speakers around the house, there are a number of great-sounding and more affordable options to choose from; the Yamaha YAS-207 ($300), for example, is affordable and supports the latest surround sound technologies by DTS and Dolby Audio.

Review: For the last week I’ve had the Sonos Beam hooked up to my Vizio M-Series (2017 model) and I can tell you, right off the bat, that the Sonos Beam won’t be for everybody. If you have an A/V receiver and two satellite speakers that are normally connected to your television, like me, you’re not going to be able to easily integrate the Sonos Beam into your home theater without a Connect:AMP, which is expensive. I didn’t have one, so I reviewed the Sonos Beam as a standalone soundbar. That said, you’re not going to buy the Sonos Beam to integrate it into your non-Sonos home theater system. It’s a soundbar that’s meant to work by itself or with other Sonos speakers. And that’s what it’s great at.

The Sonos Beam is a 3.0-channel soundbar that can be integrated into 5.1 surround sound system if you add two Sonos One (or two Play:1) speakers and a Sonos Sub. However, I’m guessing that most people looking at the Sonos Beam aren’t going to have those other Sonos speakers — yet — and are instead just looking at it as a great-sounding, versatile and entry-level soundbar. It sounds very good, with a wide stereo separation that isn’t as immersive as other immersive technologies (like Dolby Atmos or DTS Virtual:X), but still makes you feel like in the movie or show (especially if you’re watching in a small-to-medium-sized room). Using the soundbar is exactly like talking to an Amazon Echo or a Sonos One speaker. You can select from the same default music streaming services (Amazon Music, Spotify, Pandora), but the Sonos Beam just sounds bigger and better than those other smart speakers.

The other difference is that the Sonos Beam is obviously a big upgrade over your television’s speakers. When you turn on the television, the sound comes out of the soundbar and movie nights or just watching ESPN become instantly better. Worried about a tedious setup process? Don’t be. The Sonos app walks you through the whole thing, from using an optical dongle if your older TV doesn’t have an HDMI output for audio, to turn off your TV’s default speakers — it’s all really easy.

Again, the Sonos Beam excels as a soundbar and as a smart speaker. The last thing that Sonos Beam can do is control your television, and this is where it gets a little iffy. If you have an Amazon Fire TV (or dongle), it works wonderfully. In a private demo, I witnessed the Sonos Beam turn the television on and off, open up to specific shows, and pause and rewind those shows. Boom. Amazing.

I don’t have an Amazon Fire TV, though. I have an Apple TV 4K and an Xbox One, both of which are connected to the TV in my room, and I wasn’t able to utilize many Alexa commands. I was able to adjust its volume and I was also able to switch to specific channels and programs (like ESPN’s “Get Up” show in the morning) on the TV that’s in our living room, which is where our Verizon Fios cable box is connected. So if you don’t have an Amazon Fire TV, but your Sonos Beam is connected to a TV with a cable box (Sonos supports all the major providers), you’ll be able to ask Alexa to go to specific channels. But you still won’t be able to open apps on the Apple TV, like HBO Now or Netflix, until support for Airplay 2 launches in the coming weeks.

(Note: When support for Airplay 2 launches this July, anybody with an Apple TV will be able to ask Siri to play specific apps and shows. You’ll have to speak to Siri directly through your iOS device or Apple TV remote, however, and not directly through Sonos Beam like you can now with Alexa.)

Verdict: The Sonos Beam promises a lot, especially when it comes to cross-compatibility. If it’s actually able to understand and work with Alexa, Siri and Google Assistant, all at the same time, then that’s great. Better than great, actually. But I wasn’t able to test that and in my experience, when virtual assistants from one company start controlling devices from a different company, things get complicated and they never work as well as you think they should. (Siri still won’t be able to identify a song playing on Spotify, for example.)

Sonos is known for not being complicated, however. You just plug in its speakers, follow the in-app instructions and they just work. So instead of looking the Sonos Beam as this ambitious speaker for the home, even though it could turn out to be just that, I think it’s better to look at what you’re guaranteed to get out of it. And that’s an audiophile-grade smart speaker, rivaling the Google Home Max or an Apple HomePod, and that’s a terrific entry-level soundbar. Throw in the fact that it’s going to be able to work with most future smart devices, and $399 is a pretty good deal. If you have an Amazon Fire TV, it’s a steal.

What Others Are Saying:

• “At a high level, all of this means that the Sonos Beam will offer an exchange between competing voice assistants in a way that no other smart speaker on the market does. But to Jones’ point, there are still limitations around how all of that will work, due to the way the individual cloud services work. While I was at the company’s offices, Sonos more than once used an example where you’re using Siri to initiate a song and then asking Alexa to identify which song it is. In reality, that will work only if you’re playing Apple Music. Switch to Spotify and Siri can’t be used for song search or initiation, only playback and volume controls.” — Lauren Goode, Wired

• “At $399, the Beam isn’t cheap, but it’s markedly less expensive than Sonos’ other TV speakers. It’s the same price as the Google Home Max and only $50 more than Apple’s HomePod. But because it also works as a soundbar, it offers more utility than either of them. And because Sonos is trying to mediate between all these different ecosystems, it works (often better) with more services than either of them.” — Dieter Bohn, The Verge

Key Specs

Drivers: four full-range woofers, one tweeter, three passive radiators
Channels: 3.0
Key features: five-microphone array,
Compatibility: Amazon Alexa, Siri/AirPlay 2 (July), Google Assistant (sometime in 2018)

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