Connect with us

Gadgets

Review: Novostella smart LED bulbs – an illuminating review

Add some smarts to your home for cheap.

Smart rgb led bulbs
Image: Josiah Motley / KnowTechie
The Good
Bright, vibrant colors
Easy-to-use app
Affordable
The Bad
Sometimes hard to connect, but the app does a good job of coaching you through it
9
Overall

I was late to the party on smart home items like smart LED bulbs. I always thought they were a bit gimmicky, but slowly I’ve started to understand how a customizable light bulb with smart functionality can be used to enhance a room or used as a tool around the house.

Recently, I had the chance to review a 3-pack of the Novostella smart LED bulbs and was overall impressed with both the quality and usability of the product. They are not the cheapest on the market, but still affordable at approximately $30 a bulb. The lights are bright, the app is easy to use, and setting up Google Assistant integrations were a breeze.

Being that this, at its core, is a light bulb, it’s a bit tough to review some of the aspects, but in regards to the color options and brightness, I have zero complaints. The app allows you to choose a basic white LED light, or you can use a color wheel to give you room a glow of basically any color. You can also tweak brightness and saturation which is nice. There are also scenes that cycle through colors (you can set the speed), but for the most part, this just seems like a fun extra.

Smart led bulb

Please don’t judge the mess and weird lighting arrangement, kthnx (Image: Josiah Motley / KnowTechie)

There really isn’t much else to add here, so let’s dive into the app.

The Smart Life app is very straightforward and easy to use

The Smart Life app that is used to control the smart LED bulbs is available on both iOS and Android and made the entire process a breeze. There are various ways to connect your bulbs to the app and while I did have minor issues connecting the bulbs at first, I realized rather quickly that some of that was on my end. For reference, if you do set these up and use the “light switch on-light switch off” option to let the light come on before turning it back off again.

Smart led bulb

Image: KnowTechie

Integration with Google Assistant was also extremely user-friendly. Just make sure you have a Smart Life account (attached to your phone number, which you can set up in the settings), find the app within Google Assistant, and you will be up and running in literally minutes.

If you have been looking for an easy way to start making your home smarter, this is a great entry product that won’t break the bank. You can snag them off of Amazon individually or in a 3-pack for $70.

Editors’ Recommendations:

Just a heads up, if you buy something through our links, we may get a small share of the sale. Click here for more. A sample unit was provided for the purpose of this review.

The Good
Bright, vibrant colors
Easy-to-use app
Affordable
The Bad
Sometimes hard to connect, but the app does a good job of coaching you through it
9
Overall

Follow us on Flipboard, Google News, or Apple News

Former KnowTechie editor.

Click to comment

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

More in Gadgets