- New Hue Play lamps to expand your immersive lighting
- Upgraded candle bulbs with full-spectrum daylight and Matter compatibility
- New smart switches, including dimmer switches
My house is full of Philips Hue smart bulbs, motion detectors and various flavours of lightstrips, but one thing I haven’t been able to do is integrate old-fashioned light fixtures into my hue setup – so for example if you’ve got a ceiling light that doesn’t use the kind of bulbs that can be swapped out for Hue ones, you’re out of luck. Or at least, you were. Hue now offers smart light switches that you can use to add non-smart lights to your Hue system.
There are two versions, the Hue Wired On/Off and the Hue Wired Dimmer. Simply swap them for the original light switches and you can then control the appropriate lighting with the Hue app or compatible voice assistants.
The big benefit here is that your non-smart lights can now be included in your Hue groups, and in timed or other triggered events – so for example my Hue setup turns on the living room lights when I’m arriving home after dark. And it’s a boon for rooms such as kitchens where – and I’m speaking from experience here – swapping out multiple downlighter bulbs for Hue ones is ruinously expensive.
Just make sure that you put the right sort of switch for the kind of lighting you have: for example some older downlighters aren’t designed to be dimmed and can start strobing if they don’t get enough power, so you’d need the on/off switch rather than the dimmer for those.
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More Play lamps to light up your living room
In addition to the smart switches there are three new models of Play lamps: the Hue Play table lamp, the Hue Play floor lamp compact, and the Hue Play floor lamp large.
The USP of these lamps is that they pair with either the Hue…
