Philips Hue Tap Dial switch review: a smooth way to control your smart lights

The $49.99 Philips Hue Faucet Dial change is a brilliant lighting controller for the Hue superuser. It’s probably the most highly effective and modern Hue accent thus far, with 4 buttons and a bodily dial for dimming. Out of the field, the buttons and dial are tied to a zone or room, making it appear to be an overpowered Hue Good Dimmer Swap. However why restrict your self to at least one room when this may management your Hue lights all through your home?

The Faucet Dial is a wi-fi, battery-operated good change that may flip your Philips Hue lights on and off, brighten and dim them, and set lighting scenes. With a magnetic base, it may be hooked up to its included wall plate like a daily wall change or positioned on any metallic or flat floor to be used as a distant management.

It’s a part of Hue’s good lighting ecosystem, which works with Apple HomeKit, Amazon Alexa, Google House, and Samsung SmartThings. Signify (homeowners of Hue) additionally confirmed to The Verge that the change will likely be upgraded to work with the brand new good house customary Matter. Meaning someday, it’d have the ability to management much more than simply Hue lights.

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The Faucet Dial is hefty, weighing simply over two and a half ounces (an oz heavier than the Apple TV distant). However that weight is to its benefit; you may flip the dial whereas it’s sitting on the desk, and it gained’t slide round. The dial itself has a superb strong really feel as you flip it, with good haptic suggestions. It’s loads like rotating a Nest Studying Thermostat, and it’s solely a smidge smaller than that. It additionally labored rapidly and reliably, and the dimming motion was easy and responsive, with no noticeable lag.

Out of the field, it’s set as much as dim whichever lights, room, or zone you pair it with within the Hue app. Buttons one by three regulate the sunshine ranges, and the fourth cycles by 5 Hue scenes. The dial offers extra exact dimming, and a protracted press on any button turns the lights off. (Hue scenes are totally different mixtures of brightness, shade temperature, or shade, relying on the sorts of bulbs you may have.)

However there’s no actual motive to purchase the Faucet Dial when you’re simply going to manage a single room or zone. That’s what the Hue Dimmer Swap does nicely at about half the value. The Faucet Dial shines as a multizone controller for individuals with plenty of Hue lights.

I arrange the Faucet Dial in my entry corridor, with every button programmed to manage a special a part of my home. Button one turned on all of the Hue lights in the home, button two these within the entry corridor and lounge, button three the upstairs lights, and button 4 the downstairs lights. I additionally added some colourful scenes for subsequent button presses (you may press every button as much as 10 instances to cycle by further scenes) however didn’t discover myself utilizing them usually.

I set the dial to manage all of the lights without delay. One limitation of utilizing the Faucet Dial this fashion is that the dial can solely management both all lights or a single room or zone. I’d prefer it to dim or brighten the lights for whichever button you simply pressed. The marginally clunky workaround right here is to make use of the second and third presses on every button to dim the lights that aren’t managed by the dial.

The upside is I’ve a central lighting controller that offers me bodily entry to all of the lights in my home with out having to tug out a cellphone or use a voice command. That makes this gadget actually helpful. If my home have been totally outfitted with Hue lights, I’d take into account this a vital buy. It isn’t, although, and till this may successfully management each good gentle in my house, no matter model (which it could possibly do when Matter will get right here), this makes it extra of a nice-to-have than a must have for me.

The opposite concern is that even with what I assumed was an intuitive setup, it’s not straightforward to recollect which button does what, and I’d like the choice to label them with a bit icon or emoji.

In case your complete house is kitted out with Hue bulbs and lighting fixtures, this can be a helpful bodily controller to handle all of them. In case you have Hue outside lighting, it may be programmed to manage these, too. At $50, it’s an costly piece of equipment, plus it makes use of Zigbee, so you need to have a Hue Bridge ($59.99), however there aren’t many good options for dimming good bulbs.

Most good dimmer switches solely work with customary bulbs, not good ones. Your different choices for Hue bulbs, outdoors of asking a voice assistant to set the lights to 70 % or hopping right into a smartphone app, embrace urgent and holding a button on the Hue Dimmer Swap ($28) or twisting the rotating dial on the Lutron Aurora ($40), a retrofit choice for toggle switches. I’ve tried all these, and the Faucet Dial is certainly the nicest to make use of.

Should you solely have a number of Hue bulbs, you’ll be higher off with the cheaper Hue Good Dimmer, which might do every part this gadget does, simply with much less particular person room management and with a clunkier interface for dimming.

The Good Dimmer additionally has the choice of time-based lighting — the place the lights activate at a sure brightness primarily based on the time of day — an incredible characteristic that, oddly, isn’t but supplied on the Faucet Dial. Kelly Hrank, head of PR at Signify, informed me the characteristic is coming quickly. The change can also be not built-in into the Hue Labs characteristic of the Hue app, which helps you to arrange extra highly effective lighting scenes, and Hrank says there are not any plans to take action.

Like the sooner now discontinued Hue Faucet, the Faucet Dial can be utilized as a HomeKit scene controller, however proper now, you shouldn’t hassle. The dial doesn’t work in HomeKit (which is a limitation of Apple’s, not Hue’s), and you’ll solely use a single press to set off Automations. That makes this $50 dial change a much less helpful model of the Wemo Stage I simply reviewed, which is designed particularly for HomeKit and was faster at working HomeKit Automations than the Faucet Dial in testing.

The Faucet Dial will likely be getting extra options shortly. The choice to “Configure in HomeKit” has been out there for Hue equipment for years, however the Hue app now comprises an choice to configure the Faucet Dial in one other app — the Faucet Dial is the primary Hue accent to assist this. The choice doesn’t do something but, however Hrank informed The Verge that Amazon Alexa will likely be among the many apps you may set the Faucet Dial up in.

This ought to imply you’ll have the ability to use the Faucet Dial to manage any Alexa-compatible good gadget (not simply Hue, and never simply lights), as is the case when you use it in HomeKit. Plus, if the dial is uncovered to Alexa, this could be a really helpful lighting management for the huge Alexa ecosystem, particularly when you may use the buttons to set off Routines. I’ll check this as quickly as it’s out there and report again.

All this openness is probably going a part of the preparation for Matter, a novel characteristic of which is multi-admin management — the choice to set gadgets as much as be managed by any Matter-compatible ecosystem. With Matter-support, the Faucet Dial could possibly be used to manage each gentle in my home irrespective of who made them — a significantly better proposition than being locked into Hue’s costly ecosystem.

However don’t purchase the Faucet Dial now for what it’d have the ability to do later. In case you have Hue lights all through your own home and need to have the ability to management them from a single gadget (with a bodily dimmer!), the Faucet Dial is helpful now. For anybody else, wait and see what’s coming.

Pictures by Jennifer Pattison Tuohy / The Verge