Philips hue Marks a New Era in Intelligent Home Lighting

Philips hue Marks a New Era in Intelligent Home Lighting

Philips has introduced the Philips hue, a web-enabled LED home lighting system that's controllable via your smartphone or tablet.

The intuitive app lets you remotely command and personalize your home lighting experience, with custom settings and program timers to help manage your daily schedules, all through a smart device. A starter pack includes three bulbs that simply screws into your existing lamps, and a bridge that you plug into your home Wi-Fi router. It also features expert LightRecipes: four pre-programmed lighting settings based on Philips’ research around the biological effects that lighting has on the body. These scenarios adjust bulbs to the optimum shade and brightness of white light to help you relax, read, concentrate or energize.

The next generation of the hue app can now hook up to your essential Internet services via your smartphone or tablet, so your bulbs can act as indicators for weather, stock quotes, sports scores, email, social media, and more. They can be set to behave in any way you choose. For example, to change color if it is going to rain; to blink if you receive an urgent email or Facebook message from someone special; illuminate gradually as the sun sets; or even flash in your sports team’s colors when they score. This is made possible through Internet automating service, IFTTT (If This Then That), meaning your home lighting can now connect to the world in innumerable, exciting new ways.

The hue app v1.1 is the first upgrade to hue’s future-proof system and will be delivered to existing users via a simple-to-download software update. Its new ‘geofencing’ feature means your smartphone or tablet can detect when you or your family are approaching or leaving home and trigger hue’s bulbs to turn on/off automatically, change color or light setting – all without having to even take your phone out of your pocket.

The recurring schedules feature means you can program hue to enhance your family’s daily routine and create settings for activities such as waking up, homework or bedtime – without the need to reset each day. If you go on holiday, the timer function can be set to turn lights on and off at random times while you’re away, to give you peace of mind.

You can now download the Philips hue for your iPhone, iPad or Android devices.