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Your next home rave could be powered by a Samsung phone and Hue lights
- In Q4 2022, Philips will let you synchronize your lights with music playing on your Samsung phone or tablet thanks to a new Hue-SmartThings integration.
- The feature will work with any music app, not just Spotify or specific streaming services.
- Philips also announced many new lights and features, including a new Corsair collaboration for gamers.
Galaxy owners who also happen to have Philips Hue lights in their homes will be pretty excited to find out that Samsung and Signify are collaborating to make it easier to host a home rave. Or, in more precise words, to synchronize music playing on their phones with their Hue lights.
Unlike the previous Spotify integration with Hue, this doesn’t have access to your exact playlist and doesn’t analyze the entire metadata of a song to anticipate upcoming beat changes. Instead, it monitors audio output and looks for beats. The upside is that it works with any music app on Samsung phones and tablets, so it’s no longer limited to Spotify. You could synchronize your lights with local music files just as well as any streaming service, or potentially even that 20-minute voice message from your long-lost aunt.
However, the downside could be longer latency and less precise rhythmic synchronization, but we won’t know for sure until we see this in action and judge it ourselves. Either way, be ready for some mildly stroboscopic effects. Personally, I find these cool for all of two seconds, before I switch back to my normal lights.
The feature should go live in Q4 of 2022 via an update to the Samsung SmartThings app — look for the “Music Sync” feature when it launches.
In addition to the SmartThings integration, Philips has announced a number of new lights and features at IFA 2022. Chief among them is a new PC light strip that works with Hue’s Sync app for PC. It comes in three variants aimed at 24-27-inch monitors (£129.99), 32-34-inch monitors (£149.99), and three-monitor setups (£219.99).
To further attract the gaming crowd, Hue has also rolled out deep integration with Corsair’s iCUE app, allowing you to synchronize your room’s lights with those of your PC’s internal components and external peripherals. No specific games were mentioned, but it seems like you could at least expect a few of them to work. Philips is pushing this a bit further too, by allowing you to turn your lights red if your PC overheats for example.
For the non-gamers amongst us, Hue will soon have a proper vacation mode called “Mimic presence.” It’ll turn your lights on at a specific time or after sunset and basically pretend you’re home to deter thieves. The feature could already be manually set with schedules or through Hue’s more intricate Labs section, but it’ll now be an easier one-step toggle. Turn it on to override the rest of your automations; turn it off to go back to your preset schedules.
Other new products include a new tunable filament candle bulb (£39.99), a new series of shiny and elegant “Lightguide” bulbs that sits somewhere between the filament and regular bulb series (starting £74.99), and a thin 0.75-inch downlight for the North American market aimed at low-ceiling basements and bathrooms.