Qube Smart Bulb – If you’ve been waiting for a less expensive no hub required color-changing smart bulb your wait might just be over. Many of you over the years have emailed me, and made comments on the articles, and said why are these color-changing bulbs. So expensive, so it’s a few traditionally and even the lifx products be the top end of those tiers, for the individual bulbs when you add them on to say an existing system, are about $60 each most people are like.
I’m not paying $60 for a qube light bulb, but that’s ridiculous, one company or a startup company decided to tackle that very issue, over a year ago and they came up on my radar and of course, I back to them on IndieGoGo. Now they have been a little bit delayed, actually a lot delay they were supposed to ship last summer, but finally the product showed up yesterday. This is the Qube Smart Bulb.
I actually featured them in what was new with the smart lighting, and let’s go ahead and open it up. I haven’t I have seen this in the wild in terms of it with at CES, so I know what it looks like it’s a good look involved, if it’s the same as the production model, just going to open this up here.
So here is the box, I’m not even, I’m showing you there’s nothing it’s just packaging well that’s not perfect, there we go that’s what is a grand reveal sync reveal, there we go there is the cube smart bulb, and it’s your pretty standard looking LED smart bulb.
So let’s go ahead and skip ahead move forward, and turn it on and get started it’ll flash a couple different colors saying that it is ready to go, and to be associated with the the app, which you have to set up an account at the very beginning before you gaming start this process which, I’m not a big fan of, but it does let you control the bulb from also from outside your home, and probably save some settings to their servers.
Qube Light Bulb
So anyways we’ll name the new house, the new home and then we will go in and start actually, actually adding rooms. So then we can associate the bulb, or bulb with individual rooms. It allows you to group them together and control them, if you have more than one and do all kinds of fun things with it.
So now we’ll go ahead and add the bulb it’ll scan the Wi-Fi network, and then we will associate the bulb, with it and then we’ll have to associate the Wi-Fi network with the bulb itself, that they can kind of independently operate and also operate, when you are away from your home Wi-Fi network.
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So will nominate, nominates kind of a weird word books will nominate cup and string my good old Wi-Fi network, and press done, and here we are controlling the cube one, and you can turn it on and off with that quick little button there, the interface is strangely familiar to me.
I won’t say what it looks like but it looks like another manufacturers, somewhat like another manufacturers interface, the dimming is a little bit choppy in person looks smoother on article, and sometimes it’s hard to grab the little dimming slider. I don’t know if that’s my phone or the app, but it dims kind of okay to a reasonable low level dimming, and we’ll jump to a couple the colors before I adjust camera settings.
So you can see a little bit better of the saturation colors, the saturated colors, there’s the color wheel you can switch over to a control wheel, that seems to jump back to full brightness, which is a bug that they need to work on, but you can jump from warm down to 2 or up to cool whites, as well and kind of everything in between, will jump back to colors, it sees this a little bit – I made a camera adjustment so you can see a little bit better the the saturated colors.
Here you can see at the edge and at the top, you can see some of the LEDs, if you look close enough, this doesn’t really affect it, if you’re shining it at something or if it’s under a lamp shade those don’t worry too much about that. Now we’re going to jump into moods which are scenes basically.
I’m just creating a second one here, I’m just going to call it red set it to, I’m going to bring the brightness down a little bit, so it looks better on camera, and I’ll hit done and then you can smoothly jump between number of these scenes that can have a number of different bulbs, established or set for them, and set those to your heart’s content, and now I’m going to jump over to the automations area.
Qube Smart Home
They’ve got scheduled and proximity, I’m just going to go into schedule, it’s a little bit of a weirdness interface only because you can set a start and an end time, which I don’t truly understand that I normally use to the schedule and just set it to do something at a certain time.
Proximity is where bluetooth will detect your presence, and as you walk closer to a bulb or away from it, it’ll turn on or turn off, but it won’t find my phone as a Bluetooth device, which is kind of weird. So anyhow I can’t really test this and I still says please you know, set up a personal device, so that’s a little odd.
So as you can see through some of the demos the overall experience of the app and the bulb itself, are a little bit rough around the edges at this point, but I think that’s okay. Obviously I have my own Mystics with it the dimming is not perfect color selection, the way to select the colors was fine, but the the whites was a little bit funky and the whites weren’t perfect on the bulb itself, but these things can be tweaked.
The connectivity in terms of on the Wi-Fi, I felt that it could be faster in terms of the response, and also that on there. I expected it to be a little bit slower, a little bit more laggy on LTE which it was but that’s fine because it’s going way outbound, and coming back into my own network here.
Anyways it does what it says it does at this point for the most part. I think it’s okay, it’s going to get better these products all go through revisions, sometimes major revisions software wise over the coming weeks and months. One major lagging issue at this point is the lack of an iOS app, to keep you really you guys have to relate it on that, unless it’s, somewhere that’s being held up by Apple, because a huge portion of your market is kind of missing at this point.
In terms of the physical side, aside from the dimming and issue, I mean I’m a lighting guy as well, so I tend to look at dimming in low-end and all those different things, there wasn’t any flicker or diversity to be seen because all the tech is in here, so that you’re not relying on an external dimmer.
So no problem there, you can see the LEDs a little bit through the diffuser, if that’s a problem for you then maybe this isn’t the right product, but remember that if you put it under a lampshade, if it’s in a recessed can by the time of the light is a couple inches away its diffused, there’s no issue you’re not going to see like little points of LED colored light whether it’s in white mode, or if it’s in one of the colors, and because some of the other products made by their manufacturers have had to go through revisions.
Qube Smart Bulb
I’m talking too fast, to get to perfection in terms of color saturation, it’s not an issue here with the cube smart bulb, they’ve got perfect color saturation they look great, and they looks pretty good actually even, when dimmed pretty low. So that part’s good I actually think it’s a refreshing design, as well in terms of the kind of dark charcoal gray of the shell and the heatsink here, instead of just being a plain white bulb.
So this could actually fit in nicely, if you if that’s your style and you want something that looks a little bit different, I think you know good job guys, as far as not just design but the mechanical side the electrical side, it’s available in worldwide voltages in worldwide, basis for e206, e207 and B22.
I believe that’s that’s all they’re on their website, so you can get this now through their website qube smart home – smarterhomelife.com and also through Amazon, I’m going to say that this is a pretty good product at this point, I’m not going to say it’s outstanding, I’m not going to say it’s oh my goodness amazing, but does what it says it’s supposed to do, they broke the price barrier.
If you’ve been waiting for just like I said, if you’ve been waiting for a product like this as cheaper doesn’t require a starter kit or a hub, this may be the one for you, it’s a pretty good product and I’m glad to see that the market has responded to everyone’s demands, and someone has actually done it.
Otherwise that’s it I’ll be back with a longer review, we’ll take a look at comparisons, we’ll take a look at the light strip, once that launches this summer, and otherwise it’s on sale it’s 29 bucks. I think you can’t beat it for what it is, at this point and it will get better over time. Smarter home life is made possible in part by kind wonderful amazing viewers, just like you. Learn how you can help keep the show going strong through 2017 and Beyond, at support SHL.com.