Nanoleaf’s hands-free lights could be smarter than Philips Hue
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Forget TVs and games consoles, innovative smart home tech is all the rage at this year’s CES show – and we may have finally seen a new intelligent lighting solution to rival Philips Hue’s range of industry-leading bulbs.
The best smart bulbs lets you instantly change the atmosphere in your home with the tap of a smartphone, and the Philips Hue Color Ambience has been ranked as our top choice of smart bulbs available since 2021. Now, though, Nanoleaf has upped its smart home game by unveiling an impressive intelligent lighting system – dubbed the Sense + Control family – at CES 2023.
Consisting of three products – the Sense+ Smart Light Switch, Sense+ Wireless Light Switch and Nala Learning Bridge – Nanoleaf’s latest range eliminates the need to manually create schedules for your smart lights. Instead, the company says the new setup is able to teach you routines to automatically adjust the brightness and color of the lights in your home.
“Over time, users will be able to have a really intelligent and hands-free experience with the smart lighting in their home,” Nanoleaf said at CES, explaining that Nala refers to the brand’s new Automations Learning Assistant (NALA, get it? ), which will also find its way into existing Nanoleaf Thread Border Routers in the future.
All three devices in Nanoleaf’s new Sense+ Control line – expected to launch in the second half of 2023 – are Matter and Thread-enabled, meaning you can easily connect them to the rest of your compatible smart home goodies.
At CES, Nanoleaf confirmed its intention to make its Shapes, Elements, Canvas and Lines lamps also compatible with Matter later this year. The former third place on our list of the best smart bulbs money can buy, so we expect old and new Nanoleaf products to shake up the order of our list in the coming months.
On paper, if anything, Nanoleaf’s new Sense + Control setup seems smarter than even Philips Hue’s top-notch control models. Products from the latter brand ask you to manually select the time and days you want the brightness to be automated, while Nanoleaf claims the Sense+ family will learn to do that same legwork for you “over time”.
Of course, we’ll have to test that claim for ourselves once we get our hands on Nanoleaf’s latest smart lighting solution later this year. It’s also worth noting that Nanoleaf products typically don’t offer the same level of brightness and vibrancy as their Philips Hue equivalents, despite offering the same color gamut selections. So while Nanoleaf’s Sense+ family doesn’t include bulbs, the jury is still out on how good the automation will actually turn out to be.
Check out our CES 2023 hub for all the latest from the show as it happens. We cover everything from 8K TVs and foldable displays to new phones, laptops and smart home gadgets, so stay with us for the big stories.