Save £65 on the colourful Philips Hue Starter Kit

Philips makes the most name-recognisable smartlight product around, but it’s far from the cheapest. Thankfully, Amazon’s sales week makes the cost of making your home a smart home a fair bit more palatable with up to £65 off the Philips Hue Starter Kit.

The Starter Kit contains everything you need to get going – which is to say the Bridge for connecting it to your router, and then three different bulbs, each capable of glowing in 16 million different shades.

You’ll need to know what kind of light fitting you have. The B22 Bayonet Cap and E27 Edison Screw will set you back £85, for a saving of £65 off the £150 RRP. The GU10 Spot lights, unfortunately, will cost you £10 more at £95, so hopefully your house isn’t full of flatties.

For those unfamiliar, Philips Hue lets you control your house’s lights directly from your smartphone. And because this is the Colour Ambiance kit, you can also set the mood lighting by selecting one of 16 million shades to the brightness of your choosing.

That’s pretty cool in its own right, but it really comes into its own when you combine it with either Google Home or Amazon’s Alexa. Then you can turn on the lights with the power of your voice, by saying “Hey Google, dim the lights in my hallway” or “Alexa, turn my kitchen lights green”. It’s like all your science fiction dreams come true.

That voice functionality, for me, makes all the difference. I have a smart light in my bedroom, chiefly because the light switch is on the other side of the room. I said goodbye to stubbed toes when I upgraded, and can now turn it off while lying down.

At this price, I strongly suggest you do the same.

Written by

Alan Martin

Alan Martin is a freelance writer with more than a decade’s worth of experience, mainly in the technology space, with bylines at The Evening Standard, Tom's Guide, The i and many others. His main focus at Expert Reviews is ensuring that your next pick of phone or wearable is the right choice for you and represents the best possible value for money. In the past he’s covered a broad range of games, dental apparel and pet accessories and, on one memorable occasion, had to strip off to retrieve a rogue drone from a lake – such is his dedication to reviews.

More about