To summarise this Inner Flex Light review: while it may not be the most powerful smart lighting strip around, you can be sure that it's fantastic value for money, and that it will work with your Philips Hue bridge.
Lighting up your home with app-controlled smart tech no longer needs to cost you the earth. The market has become jam-packed with cheaper alternatives making smart lighting accessible and easy to use. If you want to kit out your whole home, take a look at T3's guide to the best smart bulbs to find out which system is the best choice for you.
Using a light strip to line walls or frame furniture, you can create the perfect atmosphere for any type of occasion - be it for a movie night, romantic night in or cocktails in the kitchen. So, how does Innr's light strip stack up against the competition? Read this Innr Flex Light review to find out.
Innr Flex Light review: price and availability
The best place to get your hands on an Innr Flex Light is from Amazon where you can choose between a 2-metre strip or a 4-metre strip. The 2m option costs £49.99 in the UK and $39.99 in the US. The 4m Flex Light is £69.99 in the UK and $69.99 in the US.
In the UK, you also get the option to buy the 4m strip light without the wall socket, for no difference in cost. Instead, it comes with a 1m power cable with an LED driver which connects directly to 230V.
The biggest benefit of using Innr lights over Philips Hue is the cost: the 2m Philips Hue Lightstrip Plus is £63.99 / $79.26 from Amazon, that's quite a substantial difference. Philips Hue doesn’t have a 4m option either, you’d either need to buy double or get the base 2m kit with the 1m extension for a 3m light which would cost £82.18 / $104.94.
Innr Flex Light review: features and design
What's really great about the Innr Flex Light is that you can use it with any Zigbee bridge including Innr's, although I had it set up with the Philips Hue bridge.
Illuminating the room with both white and coloured lights, the Innr Flex Light has 30 coloured RGBs and 30 white LEDs per metre, in the 4m Flex Light that's 240 LEDs in total! There are 16 million colour options available, and the temperature ranges from 1800K to 6500K.
Boasting a 25,000-hour lifespan, it matches the longevity of the Philips Hue Lightstrip Plus. However, one area that the Innr Flex Light definitely does fall down in is brightness. The 2m Innr strip has 600 lumens (1,200 in the 4m) which is pretty dim in comparison to Philips’ 1,600 lumens.
As you can use these lights with any Zigbee bridge, you’ll be able to manage them using whichever app you normally use. If you have the Innr bridge, you can use the Innr app. Or if you have the Philips bridge, you can use the Hue app. The Flex Light will easily link up to your smart home, can be grouped into a room and adjusted simultaneously with your other lights. Compatible with both Amazon Alexa and the Google Assistant, you’ll be able to use your smart speakers to control it too. Bear in mind that it doesn’t work with the Apple HomeKit or the Hue Entertainment functionality.
Like you’d expect, there’s a sticky strip along the back of the light to secure it in place. You can cut the light to the length you need, every 16.6cm along the strip. Think carefully about where you place it though as you won’t be able to extend it again once it’s been snipped, and the sticky side will only really work once.
Innr Flex Light review: performance
Setting up the Innr Flex Light with my current Philips Hue system was simple, just like adding any other Hue light I plugged it in and searched for a new device in the Hue app. It took a matter of minutes. Once up and running, it works the same as the other lights, with the same Hue colour wheel and preset scenes.
10mm wide, the Innr Flex Light is narrow enough to look discreet wherever you need to put it. That makes it perfect to use under tabletops or across shelving for example.
Given the Innr Flex Light uses completely separate LEDs for whites and colours, the different shades of white could look a little disjointed. It creates those shades by pairing the white and coloured lights together, you can see how this works in the image below. This meant sometimes it just didn't look quite right, and sometimes used far too much blue light. It's a far cry from the seamless shades you get using the Philips Lightstrip Plus. Once the strip was hidden away, it was less noticeable and having the LEDs placed so close together does give the effect of a full bar of light in a dark room, as opposed to a strip with individual lights placed along the length of it.
When it came to the colours themselves, I didn't notice too much of a difference between the Innr Flex Light and the Philips Lightstrip. At times, I could see that it lacked vibrancy and looked slightly dull in comparison, though that was only on certain colours. Being quite dim, the Innr Flex Light won’t be suitable to use as stand-alone room lighting, it’ll be better suited to use as mood lighting or alongside other lights.
Transitioning between colours and scenes was smooth and instantaneous. As I flicked between them, the Innr strip was completely in tune with the Philips lights around the room.
Innr Flex Light review: verdict
We’ve previously reviewed the Innr smart bulbs, concluding that they’re “a basic and affordable smart lighting option, but you can probably find better alternatives”. Like the Innr bulbs, the Inner Flex Light is basic and it may not be the brightest or the most vibrant choice out there. Alongside your other lights though, it'll be an excellent way to add some colourful mood-lighting to the room. Plus being available in two length options means that you can find the perfect fit for your home, even if you can’t extend them.
If you’ve invested in the Philips Hue lighting system, and want to grow it, but don’t want to empty your pockets for an expensive new strip light - the Innr Flex Light is a cheap and cheerful solution.
Innr Flex Light review: also consider
In this review, I’ve largely been comparing the Innr Flex Light to the Philips Hue equivalent, the Lightstrip Plus. But there’s actually plenty of other light strips worth considering.
If you don’t already have a bridge, and you don’t plan to have too many smart lights dotted around your home, then it could be good to consider using a Wifi-only light strip like the TP-Link KL430. It not only gives you high-quality lighting with some extra fun effects like Rainbow or Candy Cane lights, but it also saves fiddling around with overcomplicated bridge setups. It’s just a case of plugging it in, downloading the Kasa app and getting going.
Want a Philips light to use outside? Find out what your options are in T3's list of the best Philips Hue outdoor lights.
- Control your home by voice using one of the best smart speakers
