Philips Hue 4+

Overall I’m much happier with the ease of use and scene selections available in the upgraded Hue app. I’ve been a long time user of Hue products and have always thought their app was kinda crap compared to the others available and their associated scenes. Thanks Phillips Hue Team for your dedication and effort in making sure you offer a user experience that’s uncomfortable to any other product/ service on the market. I also appreciate seeing the outdoor line expand as my lights are definitely my favorite feature in my home and I’m unsure of hat I would do without it in my life. Definitely increases my quality of life by a drastic amount. I’ve been passionate about lighting for years now as this is the second home to have Color Hue bulbs throughout and after working for a new home builder I was able to really pitch your product to quite a few homeowners that are now hopefully lifetime customers as well. I’m in the Seattle area but if their were ever a career opportunity within your organization that involves Sales and Marketing, I’d love to work with your incredible team. Thanks so much!

James Schneider - Seattle

The Hue system is the best I’ve seen for home smart lighting, hands-down! The app is beautiful, and the out-of-the-box scenes are gorgeous, and work pretty seamlessly; the more Hue lights you have, the better it looks, and it scales automagically when I add new lights. The automations are the only disappointment I have with it at all; they’re super basic, and haven’t improved much over the last ~3 years or so since I’ve had Hue lights. A recent update actually seems to have removed some of the previously-available functionality of the automations, and/or made the UI for that part of the app very unintuitive (I’m not sure which yet — still trying to figure it out since the changes). It’s way more difficult (impossible?) to get really granular scene fades/changes than it should be, IMO. To be fair, it looks to me like they’ve been focusing on making automations “just work” out of the box, rather than making users create a bunch of complex automations manually, but for those of us who have really specific ideas about how we want our automations to work, the automations are still woefully lacking, even after all these years of time they’ve had to build those features out. There are other apps that pick up some of the slack, but they’re very unpolished and in some ways worse. So, all that is to say — yay for this app for being the best overall app available for Hue lighting, but why are the automations still so basic, after all this time!?!?

I absolutely love the huge system. The only thing I do not like about it is how many times I go to buy lightbulbs and it comes with a bridge. I do not need a bridge. Every time I go to buy lightbulbs. This bulbs are expensive enough and I should not have to buy another bridge every time I get more bulbs and expand. There are also some problems that Philips seems to refuse to address like if you turn a routine off then back on a day or two later it may not actually turn on the first time making it unreliable. I have contacted Philips HUE about all
of my issues even those not listed in this review and expressed how much I love the system still, their response was to make me part of their beta program to help them evaluate new and current products & I was also told I would get a small discount on items I purchase but I do not get the discount I was told so costco, BJs and Sam’s club are where I have found the best deals. I also feel like they wasted a lot of my time telling me they were going to send me all sorts of products to test around late 2019 but as of February 2023 I still have not gotten any and when I contact Philips they have no idea what I am talking about so they wasted 4+ hours of my time getting me set up for their beta/new product test program for nothing! To make matters worse the problems with the routines still is not fixed!