Philips Hue Essential A60 - Still Not Quite Smart Enough

This is going to be a review of two halves.

And it's mostly because I've painted myself into an IoT corner.

When I first started testing smart home devices, most of them were very locked into their respective "ecosystems."

Apple TV and Apple HomePods used Siri to control other devices designed specifically to be Apple-friendly, with companion apps tailor-made for iOS.

If you wanted to control an Echo speaker or a Ring doorbell, that was a job for Alexa.

Nest cameras and doorbells only talked to Google Assistant.

And don't get me started on Samsung and SmartThings.

But all that's over now, right? Thanks to protocols like Matter and Thread, these days every smart device now integrates seamlessly with every other one, regardless of what brand, what type and what kind of virtual assistant you're controlling them with. Right?

If only. 

To be fair to Philips, the Hue range of smart lighting products have always been a bit more platform-agnostic than most, so I was pretty confident the new Essential A60 E27 bulbs would slot into my twisted web of random IoT gadgets pretty seamlessly.

And to be fair to everyone else, between Matter, Thread, Zigbee, Bluetooth, Wi-Fi 7 and every other damn thing that makes these doodads work, I have started to see some slow-but-steady improvement when it comes to interoperability.

In fact, according the the Hue Essentials A60 web page, they now work with Alexa, Google Home, Apple Home, IFTTT, Matter, Samsung SmartThings, Sonos and something called Klikaanklikuit, which I've never even heard of but I'm certainly going to look up after I finish writing this review.

But at the very least, although they're pitched as being a bit more entry level than the more expensive Hue White and Color bulbs, I'd have thought setting them up with the native Hue app would be the best way to go.

The Hue app has evolved quite nicely over the years and has now incorporated the Hue Sync app which used to be required to control the HDMI Sync boxes I've reviewed previously. This means you can see all your Hues in one place, designating them to specific rooms or groups, creating automations and schedules or just manually controlling various effects and other features from your phone.

I was sent three Essential A60 bulbs - which is slightly strange given they seem to come in packs of either two or four - and as expected, I had no issues whatsoever setting up the first bulb, in my dining room where I already have a trio of White and Colour Hues installed.

However, the second bulb wouldn't complete its setup process, even after several re-tries. So I resorted to installing it via the Amazon Alexa app instead. After all, I was intending to control these lights using Alexa anyway. (I also talk to Google and Siri in my house but let's not get distracted... Yet.)

Then the third light proved even more stubborn. I tried multiple times with Hue. I tried with Alexa. I tried with Apple Home. But it wasn't until I tried with Google Home that I had any success.

At this point, I assumed all would be well. Everything talks to everything else now, remember? Because Google Assistant now knew I had a new light in the dining room, surely Alexa and Siri would too.

Apparently not. Grrrrrr.

To cut a long story slightly shorter, I eventually managed to link my recalcitrant bulbs to the Hue app by going into another room and screwing them into a bedside lamp instead. Why this made any difference, I have absolutely no idea.

All my Hue devices are paired with a Hue Bridge Pro, which although tucked away in my entertainment cabinet under my TV in the living room, has never had any issue talking to its companions wherever I've installed them around the house - even outside. So it's all a bit of a frustrating mystery.

The good news is, once I screwed all the bulbs back in to where I wanted them, they performed perfectly, as if nothing had ever happened - and they continue to, many days later.

There's a reasonably short list of fairly specialised missing features that make the new Essential bulbs more affordable - they don't have the exact colour-matching ability of their more premium stablemates, their peak brightness isn't quite as peak and they only dim down to 2% - as opposed to 0.2%. Why you need lights that dim to 0.2%, I'm not exactly sure. And as you'll see from my video below, I think you'd need a pretty discerning eye to be able to detect the difference between the different shades of different colours.

The important thing is, you can still set these to whatever colour and brightness you like and you can still control and automate them with all those different virtual assistants I mentioned earlier. The long list of preset colour scenes keeps getting longer in the Hue app and obviously you can create and save your own scenes too.

And excitingly, when Essential A60s are paired with the Bridge Pro like mine are, you can then activate Motion Aware. If you have a minimum of three Hue devices in the same space, Motion Aware basically turns them into motion sensors - so the lights can now turn themselves on when you walk in the room. Or, alternatively, you can use them to fire off other automations instead.

Unlike my initial setup struggles, calibrating Motion Aware using the Hue app was effortless and I now want my whole house to work that way.

So in a nutshell, the Essential A60 smart bulbs are pretty great. So great, I personally would struggle to choose the more expensive alternatives from this point on. Especially given my only major criticism of previous Hue products was always how expensive they are compared to competing devices.

I'm sure my setup ordeals were more due to my jumbled conglomeration of various IoT bits and pieces all connected via different apps to different hubs and controlled by different virtual assistants. One of these days I'm going to sit down and try and figure out why Alexa thinks I have two different devices called Dining Room Light 1 - and when you click on either of them the same bulb turns on or off.

Eventually, devices like these will make my life easier instead of more complicated, like they're supposed to. Today wasn't that day, but I have high hopes for tomorrow.

    

Click here for more information and pricing on the Philips Hue Essential A60.