Philips Hue's new lights bring bigger, brighter colors outdoors
An all-new wall sconce, a more powerful spotlight and a new footpath light, plus new voice-control features for the Play Sync Box, announced at CES 2020.
Philips Hue's new Lily XL brings brighter, more powerful lighting to your front or back yard.
Today at CES 2020, Philips Hue's parent company Signify unveiled a handful of new additions to the Philips Hue outdoor lighting collection as well as a firmware update to the Philips Hue Play HDMI Sync Box that offers more ways to control the color-syncing TV device. Philips Hue is already represented on CNET's list of the best smart home devices of 2020, and these additions and updates might further secure the smart lighting platform's place as one of the biggest -- albeit premium-priced -- players in the smart home field.
The new Appear wall sconce light from Phillips Hue creates a unique lighting design outside the home.
For those who'd like to expand their smart home lighting system outside the home, Philips Hue offers a wide range of outdoor lighting solutions, including a newly announced wall sconce called Appear. The $139 color-changing light projects triangular beams both up and down in 16 million possible colors and 50,000 shades of white light.
Philips Hue also introduced an upgrade to its existing Lily outdoor spotlight -- the Lily XL, which Signify says is larger and more powerful than the existing Lily. Rounding out the new product announcements is an addition of a low-voltage, footpath pedestal light to Philips Hue's Econic line of lantern lights.
This spring, a scheduled firmware update will allow owners of the Philip's Hue Play HDMI Sync Box to connect the device to a digital assistant -- whether they use Amazon's Alexa, Apple's Siri or Google Assistant. The update will be available for installation using the Hue Sync mobile app. In the meantime, the device is now able to learn existing remotes, allowing users to program buttons to turn the device on or off and switch between HDMI inputs.
Sounds like the CNET Smart Home team will be busy as ever this year. Look for more coverage of the new lights and features as they arrive later this year.
Philips Hue added a line of low-power footpath lights to its Econic line of lantern lights.