Smart home specialist, Trust, has today announced the launch of its Smart Home WiFi lighting range in the UK, offering a raft of budget-friendly smart WiFi lighting products to take on the likes of Phillips Hue.
Positioned as a Philips Hue alternative that won't break the bank, Trust's new smart lighting products also offer Alexa and Google Nest compatibility for complete voice control. You'll also be pleased to know that there are a variety of different bulbs on offer to fit the many different light sockets in your home.
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Trust's new smart bulbs and smart plug can be controlled via a single smartphone app, with the brand promising a hassle-free way to connect without needing an expensive hub. By contrast, Philips Hue relies on the Hue Bridge to connect its lights and accessories, which means users incur another cost on top of the base product range. Before you know what's happened, it means you can be saddled with huge sums before you've even switched your first Hue bulb on.
For a very reasonable sum of £20.99/AU$46, though, Trust is offering a color-changing duo bulb pack to add some much-needed pizazz to your front room. By comparison, one Philips Hue color bulb costs £49.99/AU$79.95 at retail pricing, which puts the chasm in cost between the two brands in perspective.
Everything in technicolor
The other notable launch alongside the lighting range is Trust's smart WiFi plug, handling the switching on and off of your devices, and enabling users to program desired times for your devices to wake up. Of course, this isn't anything groundbreaking: many other options that exist on the market already offer a similar mode of functionality, which we've kindly compiled for you in our pick of the best smart bulbs.
Here at T3, we very much like the look of the Color Changing Light Bulb, which lets you choose from a series of pre-programmed scenes or customize your own palette. Trust says that these scenes can then be paired with "a range of smart scenarios to automate lighting as desired, using timers and conditions." For a user, that may translate to the bulb dimming in the evening or aligning with, say, your alarm clock waking you up in the morning.
With names like Phillips Hue nowadays synonymous with the smart lighting sector, it's always good to see more affordable lighting options enter the market like Trust's new smart lighting range, with the Wyze Bulb Color another recent and super-cheap smart bulb to hit retailers' shelves.
