Philips Smart Wi-Fi LED Bulb Review

Signify (formerly Philips Lighting) lately launched the Philips Smart LED Bulb in India that works on Wi-Fi and can be controlled using the mobile app as well as voice assistants. It retails for an affordable price of Rs. 899, fighting with the likes of Xiaomi, Wipro, Syska and more. So, how easy is the setup, and how does it perform in the real world? Let’s check out the same in our full Philips Smart LED Bulb review.

Philips Smart Wi-Fi LED Bulb Review (9W)

As far as the design is concerned, the Philips Smart Wi-Fi LED Bulb looks quite conventional with a simple light dome and plastic base. It is available in both E27 and B22 caps with the latter here for review. Anyway, you can use converters to fix the bulb in either of the sockets irrespective of the variant you buy.

The Philips Smart LED bulb is based on Wiz-platform, making it more of app dependent, and thereby obviating the need for bridge connections. This makes it pretty easy to operate. To setup up the bulb, you just need to plug it into the socket, install the Wiz app(Android/ iOS) on your smartphone or tablet and connect to your home’s Wi-Fi network. However, the process may take a couple of tries, especially on iPhones.

Once set up, you can start controlling the bulb with the application. Key controls include the buttons to turn on, off and sleep, accompanied by the sliders for brightness levels and colours. Besides, there are a couple of pre-set modes including cosy, relax, fireplace, fall, club, sunset, spring, summer, forest and many more. You can even create a custom colour based on your liking.

The Philips Smart Wi-Fi Bulb also lets you automate your lighting, using its timer and scheduling functions. For instance, the lights would turn on automatically as you get into your home or turn dim by night. And then, there’s a dedicated ‘circadian rhythm’ mode that switches the light between cool and warm temperatures suiting different parts of the day, aiding for a natural and cosy experience.

You can use Alexa, Google Assistant, and Siri for voice control, letting you power bulbs on and off, dim lights and change colours. Additionally, there’s support for IFTTT leaving further room for automation.

Talking of the performance, this is a 9W LED Bulb that gets a peak brightness of 825 lumens. This makes it bright enough to be used in an existing table lamp or wall fixture for a small to medium-sized room. However, it’s not suitable for doing tasks like reading for obvious reasons.

That said, the overall user experience is quite good, thanks to the consistent performance throughout the day. The schedule feature makes it hassle-free while the seamless connectivity with Alexa and Google Assistant aids for effortless controlling. That being said, the Wiz app can be quite buggy at times and needs to be worked upon.

Check it out on Amazon