Ever for the reason that Philips Hue LED($199.Ninety nine at Verizon) lighting equipment hit the digital dwelling market, there was a gentle uptick in competing good bulb products like the LIFX EcoLight LED Light Bulb( at Amazon) and the Linked by TCP Sensible Lighting System as well as latest product bulletins from electronics giants LG and Samsung. Add the Lumen TL800 from Tabu to that checklist. Priced at $69.99 per bulb (but out there online for round $50), the TL800 uses Bluetooth wireless know-how to speak with your smartphone via a neat little app that allows you to turn lights on and off, select colors, and have the lights behave a sure method when you've gotten an incoming telephone name. Unlike the Philips and TCP bulbs the TL800 would not require a bridge, nevertheless it doesn't hook up with the Web both, which suggests you can't management it when you're away from home or have it interact with other house automation gadgets. With a vented metal casing separating the spherical glass dome from the Edison screw base, the TL800 appears to be like like it would be proper at dwelling in an Apollo spacecraft.

The bulb measures 4.75 inches in length and places out only 400 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), EcoLight and Philips (600 lumens) bulbs. As with the Philips and LIFX bulbs, it could possibly display 16 million colours, but because it does not connect with the Web you cannot management it with residence automation hubs from companies comparable to Revolv( at Amazon) and SmartThings($149.Ninety nine at Amazon). Nor can you use the favored IFTTT (If This Then That) internet service to have it activate and off or long-life LED change colors based on things like Facebook requests, Foursquare notifications, and ESPN sports activities scores. You don't get a lot in the way in which of instructions with the TL800, however there's not much to elucidate. I screwed it into a lamp in my workplace, downloaded the app onto my iOS smartphone, made certain Bluetooth was enabled on my machine, and opened the app.

The Lumen app is uncomplicated and straightforward to make use of and allows you to management up to 10 bulbs at a time. You possibly can control every bulb individually or management a group of bulbs. The house page lists all installed bulbs and reveals you what colour they're at present set to. Pressing a bulb icon takes you to a web page the place you'll be able to select shade or heat white settings and turn the bulb on or off. When you select the warm white setting you are offered with a monochrome wheel that permits you to manually regulate brightness, or you possibly can choose one of four brightness presets (90, 70, 50, or 30 p.c). Beneath the wheel is a Call Alert icon that takes you to a web page the place you may configure the sunshine to flash a specific coloration when your phone has an incoming name. There's additionally a Wake-Up timer that can flip the light on utilizing a dim heat white setting that progressively gets brighter to create a sunrise effect, and a Proximity option that could have a gentle turn on to a preset color and brightness when your telephone comes into vary (about 30 ft).

In coloration mode you get a wheel that lets you select a colour for every bulb and assign a colour brightness setting. For deep, strong colors you set the brightness level to the darkest setting

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Pub: 09 Aug 2025 08:50 UTC

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