Lifx Plus Wi-Fi Smart Bulb review – CNET

The Good The Lifx Plus is bright and efficient as ever, features a well-designed, integrated and easy-to-use app. It produces bold, accurate colors at every hue. The new night vision feature is unique and legitimately cool.

The Bad Lifx bulbs still aren’t compatible with Apple HomeKit. Those infrared night vision diodes mean that the Lifx Plus is always drawing power, making it less efficient than its predecessors.

The Bottom Line If you use night vision cameras in your home, then these well-rounded smart bulbs can help them see in the dark — but if you don’t, there’s really no reason to buy them.

Visit manufacturer site for details.

It’s been just a little over four years since Australian inventor Phil Bosua introduced his idea for a color-changing, Wi-Fi-enabled LED on Kickstarter. Now, Lifx is already selling its third-generation smart bulb, the Lifx Plus.

The Lifx Plus looks and works just like the Lifx bulbs that came before it, but it adds in infrared diodes that cast out invisible light when the bulb is turned off. That’s the same light that night vision cameras use to see in the dark, which means the Lifx Plus can give NV cameras greater visibility in low light conditions.

It’s a cool, creative feature that worked well when I tested it out, which makes Lifx Plus worth considering if you use night vision cameras to keep an eye on your home. But if you don’t, then I say don’t bother — at $80 each (which converts to about £65 or AU$105), they cost more than standard Lifx LEDs and they don’t bring anything else new to the table besides the night vision trick.

The Lifx Plus smart bulb helps your cameras…
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Design and features

The Lifx Plus sticks to the same flat-topped design as previous-gen Lifx bulbs, adding only a plus sign beneath the Lifx logo. Like the existing Lifx bulbs, it’s an 11W LED that promises to put out about as much brightness as a 75W incandescent bulb — 1,100 lumens.

You can change the color or the white-light color temperature of each Lifx bulb with easy-to-use selector dials.

Screenshots by Ry Crist/CNET

It sticks to the same playbook on the smarts front, too. Like the original Lifx LED and last year’s second-gen Lifx Color 1000, each Lifx Plus bulb uses a built-in Wi-Fi radio to connect directly with your home network. Once everything’s synced up, you’ll be able to control the bulbs on your phone from anywhere with an internet connection.

The app controls include a complete spectrum of colors as well as sixteen dedicated white light settings. Those range from a warm, candle-like glow at 2,500 kelvin to hot, bluish-white daylight tones at 9,000 kelvin. The app also offers a number of preset color themes and lighting effects, including a music visualizer and a strobe function. You can also schedule lighting changes to happen at specific times of day, or at sunrise or sunset.

Lifx bulbs are compatible with a variety of third parties. You can sync them up with the SmartThings connected home platform, the Nest Learning Thermostat and Nest Protect smoke detectors. Or you can sync them with the Amazon Echo and Echo Dot smart speakers and get voice-activated lighting changes through Alexa, Amazon’s virtual assistant. Lifx also has a fairly robust channel on the online automation service IFTTT, which lets you trigger lighting changes using any number of IFTTT-compatible gadgets and services.

That said, none of those partners are new this generation. Compatibility with Apple HomeKit, the set of smart home protocols in the software that runs iPhones and iPads, is still missing. HomeKit compatibility is the most-requested feature from the Lifx user base, but for now at least, Lifx COO Tim Peters would only tell me to “stay tuned.”

Lifx Plus is brighter than the previous-gen Lifx Color 1000 at every white light setting, especially daylight tones.

Ry Crist/CNET

Performance

The third-gen Lifx Plus bulbs work just the same as the past Lifx bulbs, but they were at least a little bit brighter than before at every color and white light setting I tested. That’s a nice step forward given that they don’t use any more energy than last year’s bulbs do.

The only colors that were noticeably brighter with Lifx Plus than with the original Lifx LED were yellow, green, and cyan.

Ry Crist/CNET

Still, they aren’t quite as bright as advertised. At their brightest setting, the default 3,500 kelvin, I was only able to get the Lifx Plus’ lumen count up to 1,015 — a bit short of the stated 1,100 lumens and barely any brighter than last year’s Lifx Color 1000. The results were much better at other white light settings, though — particularly the bluish-white daylight tones, where Lifx Plus offers you an extra 200 lumens or so across the board. A small improvement, but a noticeable one.

The colors have gotten brighter, too, but again, only incrementally so. Compared with the very first Lifx bulbs, the Lifx Plus only puts out noticeably brighter colors at yellow, green and cyan. Other shades essentially finished in a tie, although Lifx Plus always came out slightly ahead.

Google Wifi review – CNET

The Good Google Wifi is easy to use and a breeze to set up. It has strong Wi-Fi coverage and fast speed. It costs a lot less than other mesh Wi-Fi systems.

The Bad A Google account and a mobile device are required for setup and management. It doesn’t have many advanced features or customizable network settings.

The Bottom Line Google Wifi is the best Wi-Fi system on the market.

If you want to extend fast internet to every corner of your home, the Google Wifi is the best device to do it. You just need two things:

• An internet-connected iOS or Android mobile device, like a phone or a tablet
• A Google account, which you can get for free

This is because, unlike most routers, there’s no web-based interface and the new Wi-Fi system can only be set up and controlled via the new Google Wifi mobile application. Once set up, the Google Wifi will stay connected to Google at all times and will log into your Google account each time you want to manage it.

Google says the Wifi doesn’t collect user activity data, like what sites you’re visiting. By default, it appears to collect only hardware-, app- and network-related information. However, you can turn this off in the Privacy section of the settings.

Still, a constant connection to Google is required. That’s a dealbreaker for some. Not all home mesh Wi-Fi systems, which use several “satellite” devices to extend the Wi-Fi signal, require a connection to the vendor in order to work — the Eero does while the Netgear Orbi doesn’t. Most home routers don’t require this at all.

But that’s not something most people will care about, plus it will keep the device secure from hacking via regular automatic updates. So if you’re cool with this setup, Google Wifi has the best balance of ease-of-use, performance and price yet.

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The Google Wifi includes three identical hardware pieces.

Josh Miller/CNET

What I love about Google Wifi

The price: At just $129 for a single unit or $299 for a set of three, the Google Wifi is cheaper than other Wi-Fi systems like the Eero or Orbi. (Google hasn’t said whether the Wifi will go on sale in the UK or Australia, but those prices convert to around £100 or AU$170 and £235 or AU$400.)

It’s really easy to use: It took me about 15 minutes to set up all three units using an Android phone. The whole process was self-explanatory, and dare I say, fun.

And fast. In terms of data throughput it tested well for a dual-stream AC1200 router, with a top sustained Wi-Fi speed of more than 470 megabits per second.

The nature of Wi-Fi, however, means that each time you extend the signal wirelessly, signal loss will occur, which basically means slower speed. You can mitigate this by placing the satellite units around the first router unit. To avoid this completely you can connect the units together using network cables.

Coverage and reliability is great: As a single unit or as a system of three units, the Google Wifi passed my 48-hour stress test with flying colors. During the test I set it to transfer lots of data between multiple wireless clients (four laptops in this case). The Wifi did this without any disconnections. The system also had excellent signal hand off, allowing you to walk around your house, seamlessly connecting from one unit to another without getting disconnected from the internet. I tried this while making a call over Wi-Fi and the conversation wasn’t affected at all.

Google claims the system is constantly analyzing the air space to figure out the cleanest channel and the best Wi-Fi band (5GHz or 2.4GHz) for a client to connect to. I used it in a home with many other routers and the Google Wifi network remained stable, which definitely adds credence to its claim.

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Each unit has a Gigabit WAN and a Gigabit LAN port and can work as a router or an extender.

Josh Miller/CNET

OK, so how exactly does this work?

In many ways the Google Wifi is the evolution of the company’s previous home routers, the OnHubs. The difference with the Wifi is that instead of just a single unit, you can have up to three. Each hardware unit is called a Wifi point. If you get a single unit, you have just one point, which can cover about 1,200 square feet, which is suitable for a small home or average-sized apartment. More points (up to six) scattered around the house will increase the area of coverage accordingly. A set of three units can easily cover a 4,000 square-foot or even larger home.

All Google Wifi units are identical. When multiple units are used in a home, the first unit works as the main router that connects to an internet source, like a broadband modem. The additional units extend the Wi-Fi coverage to create a single Wi-Fi mesh network. Depending on the layout of your home, you can put the Wifi points one or two rooms away from one another to maximize the Wi-Fi coverage. The Google Wifi app can help determine the best location by measuring the connection between units.

The app displays your entire home network in an easy to understand layout. You can use it to visualize your entire home network, quickly prioritize the broadband connection to any particular device, and pause the internet to one or a group of devices. You can also use it to find out which Wifi point a particular client is connected to and customize a few network settings that the Google Wifi has to offer, including guest network, IP reservation and port forwarding. Everything can be done via a few taps on your phone’s screen. Google says it will continue to update the Wifi with more features, such as voice control (via your phone, Google Home and Amazon Alexa) and support for other appliances, like the Nest thermostat. Be sure to check back to find out how these features pan out.

So yes, Google Wifi has a lot to love. It delivers both in ease of use and Wi-Fi coverage. It has great performance, too. And there’s more: If you already own one of the Google OnHubs, starting today, it will be automatically updated to be part of the Wifi ecosystem, and use the same Google Wifi app. This means, apart from being a standalone router like it has always been, any OnHub can also work as a Wifi point, the same as a unit of Google Wifi.

CNET Labs’ Wi-Fi system performance

Google Wifi (single router)

473

97.4

Netgear Orbi (single router)

416.2

229.6

Netgear Orbi (via one extender)

415.83

229.3

Eero (single router)

352.5

197.7

Almond 3 (single router)

315.8

220.6

Google Wifi (via one extender)

206.9

91.7

Eero (via one extender)

170.7

60

Almond 3 (via one extender)

159.1

110.1

Legend:

Close range
Long range

Note:

Measured in megabits per second. Longer bars mean better performance.