Philips' new Hue Bridge Pro can turn your Hue lights into motion sensors

The Philips Hue Bridge Pro has been extensively leaked over the past few weeks, and today, the company is finally launching the product. The new Philips Hue Bridge Pro is a complete redesign of Philips’ Zigbee hub and is destined to become a must-have for anyone interested in adding a bunch of Philips Hue smart lights and accessories to their smart home.

The new Philips Hue Bridge Pro features an all-black design. It can support up to 150 smart lights and 50 accessories, a vast improvement over its predecessor.

This is made possible through a new processor that is five times as powerful as the previous one. Memory has been increased 15x, allowing users to store up to 500 smart lighting scenes and benefit from faster response times. There’s also 2.4GHz Wi-Fi on board, so you aren’t stuck with an Ethernet cable anymore. Power is supplied through a USB-C port.

The new Hue Bridge Pro also comes with the upgraded Hue MotionAware feature, which allows your existing Hue smart lights to act as motion sensors. This lets them automatically switch on when they detect motion, without needing a separate motion sensor.

The new Hue Bridge Pro is compatible with Apple Home, Alexa, Google Assistant, and Samsung SmartThings.

Hue Bridge Pro pricing and availability

The new Philips Hue Bridge Pro is available for $98.99/€89.99, a fair bit more expensive than the older Hue Bridge (v2)’s $65.99 price tag (which goes down even further with sales and discounts).

Users of the original Hue Bridge can easily transfer their settings to the new Hue Bridge Pro through a migration tool. If you have multiple Hue Bridges, the company will also release a tool to combine the functionality into one Hue Bridge Pro later this year. If you’d prefer keeping the older Hue Bridge (v2) around, you can, as it is not being retired right away.