SYLVANIA General Lighting 75580 Sylvania Smart+ Bluetooth Enabled Soft White Filament A19 LED Bulb, Works with Apple HomeKit and Siri Voice Control, No Hub Required for Set Up, 4 Pack, 4 Count

I didn’t think I’d ever buy a smartbulb, but I'm glad I bought this Soft White LED.I have a frequently-used ceiling light fixture, and its associated wall switch is in an awful place. I was going to move the switch - but it's a real pain to cut into my walls (the walls are "plaster-on-metal lath" from the 1930s, which makes doing anything in the walls painful and messy). So I decided to try this smart bulb as a lazy way out of rewiring.Set up with HomeKit was a real breeze. I screwed the bulb into place and opened the Home app and I was up controlling the bulb with my iPhone in less than a minute. Homekit has improved greatly, and now I can't imagine it being any easier. I experimented with dimming and brightening the bulb, and it all worked great: good light, and good dimming. No noise and no flicker.I am happy to report that the range and reliability of the bluetooth connection is excellent. My Apple TV is literally on the other corner of my house - the bulb and the Apple TV could not be further apart. Also, as I mentioned before, I have plaster-coated metal lath in the walls - beneath all the plaster, each room is like a metal cage. And I live in the city with a ton of 2.4 GHz radio noise (I see 47 WIFI stations right now). So this seemed like a real bluetooth stress test, and I was concerned that it wouldn't work well. But over the months it has shown to be 100% reliable from everywhere I've tried it. My conclusion is that the Bluetooth LE implementation within this bulb is top notch.Power consumption is excellent. I measured the power consumed by this bulb with my kill-o-watt meter. The bulb seems to draw half a watt when the light is out, and it ramps up to about 9 watts at full brightness. I usually keep this lamp at 70%. My kill-o-watt reports this at 3.8 watts.Finally, I wanted to know what happens when someone does hit that wall switch, or after a power failure. More good news: The bulb remembers all of its settings. If the bulb was at 44% brightness when it was last used, and then my wall switch is turned off, then the bulb comes back on at 44% brightness when the switch is turned on. Perfect!In all, this is a big win, and now I can watch football or something instead of rewiring. I'll update this if anything changes.UPDATE:We've been using this bulb for over seven months now, and it is working perfectly. We use it for 5+ hours each day. Siri has controlled this bulb with a 100% success rate - it has let us down zero times. I've used the iPhone Home app to automate the bulb (turn it to 30% when it is evening and I'm not home, turn it to 70% when it is night and I am home, turn it off during the day or during sleeping hours, etc).Update: I'm happy to say that iOS 12.1 also provides 100% bulb control reliability. iOS 12.0 seemed to be a little problematic controlling the bulb.

First, the bad news: these bulbs are super expensive compared to their Alexa-enabled counterparts. But you're buying this product because it works with Home Kit, which means you're solidly embedded in the Apple ecosystem and you expect to pay out the you-know-what while the Android crowd scoffs in your general direction. However, there's a tradeoff; for the extra money you also expect a high-quality product that just *works.* And you won't be disappointed.Screw in a light bulb, open Home Kit, pair the bulb to your Apple device via the included code, and...boom. Done. You can easily change colors by dragging your finger through a color wheel in Home Kit, alter the light's "temperature" (in other words you can adjust the "warmth" or "coolness" of the light, which is not related to actual heat), fade the brightness...and best of all, you can control all of those functions via Siri.A note about Siri: set's face it, Siri is generally half-baked. But with Home Kit, she's a champ. For once, she functions exactly the way she should. "Siri, turn the lights red. Turn off the lights. Turn the kitchen light blue, and the living room light green. Turn on the Christmas scene." It all just works.And about those scenes. They're incredibly well implemented. Let's say you want a "romantic" scene. You simply set the lights to the desired color and brightness level, click "Add a Scene" in Home Kit, name the scene "romance" (you dirty dog), and those exact settings are saved as a template in Home Kit. At our house we created an aforementioned Christmas theme: half the lights turn green, half turn red. With a quick voice command to Siri, we're rocking the holiday spirit for the neighborhood to see.Oh, and another very cool feature: you can force-touch the Home Kit app-icon on your iPhone home screen to immediately access your top scenes. Clever.These bulbs represent my first foray into Home Kit, and I'm impressed. I've already spent too much on four of these lights, but I'm hooked, and I'm planning to buy more.Final verdict: expensive, but worth the money.

The product itself works very well, and integrated easily into the Apple Home app. I own 6 currently, and had ordered 2 more.The last set that were sent WERE NOT HOMEKIT BULBS. Completely different packaging, and the box and manual make it VERY clear a Zigbee Hub were REQUIRED despite what the listing on Amazon and Amazon sticker on the box say. Being that I already own 6 bulbs, it was immediately clear the wrong product had been sent. Amazon shipped two more, I was hoping to receive the correct product but was again given two more Zigbee Hub bulbs. Unfortunately, I will be returning the four bulbs and trying to find them elsewhere. If you CAN find the correct bulbs, I recommend them. They are slightly slow to respond occasionally, but never to the point where I’ve been dissatisfied with them.