Smart lights are pretty hot right now, but nobody talks about how, like, your elderly parents will control the lights when they come over. You also can't exactly tell every guest to your house to just use their phone. And the weird thing about the various smart light ecosystems is that a lot of them don't even have the option for a switch/remote. Enter this thing. It's one of the few options out there. I mean, it works. It just has a lot of weird decisions that might eventually be rectified with software. Here's a list of them: CONS: The two dimming buttons are absolutely useless. They take so long to dim the lights. You can tap the button or hold it down, but it still takes forever even if you rapidly tap it like a madman. The app will not let you adjust how granular the button presses are. Honestly, I would probably prefer the dimming to be in like 20% chunks, but it literally seems that each button press increases it by a single percentage. I don't even bother using the dimming feature on the remote; I just use my phone. This design is bizarre and inexplicable. You also cannot reprogram any of the buttons with one exception. For example, want to program the dim button make the lights blue? Cycle colors? Can't do any of that. You also can't do any kind of slightly complex programming. I wanted to make it so that holding the off button would turn off all of the lights except one and to set that light at 1% brightness as kind of a nightlight mode. Can't do that. The two dimming buttons and the off button can only do what they say. What you CAN do is program the on and off buttons to do different things with a single click, a double click, or a click and hold. I have mine set up that a single click turns them on to daylight, a double click sets them to a warm yellow, and tapping and holding turns a couple extra lights in the living room for when I need a bunch of light. I at at least appreciate this ability. You can also do something similar with the off button, but it can only turns specific bulbs off. So, like, a double click could turn off half of your bulbs if you wanted, but nothing more complicated than that. You can't turn the bulbs off one by one or anything. The buttons on the remotes are also weirdly gummy, but they work, I guess. I also had a dead battery after like two weeks. Coincidentally, we had the power go out for a period of time, so I wondered if that somehow drained the battery? Did it waste its battery communicating with the mothership only to receive silence? Or the battery was maybe just low from sitting in a box in storage? I don't know, but this is a little concerning. PROS: Setup was easy. You take out the tab on the battery, the front flashes, and you use the app to pair it to your hub. If you miss the window to sync, you just hold the on and off buttons down until it flashes. Easy. I mean, the thing does works. It turns the lights on and off. That's literally all I wanted. I mounted it to my drywall in the living room (it provides the hardware to do so) so my parents or visiting kid niece can control the lights. It looks nice, it's a decora-style plate, but I'd prefer if the logo wasn't there. I do like that it functions as both a wall switch and remote. The magnet holds it securely in place. It's also been reliable. It's never not turned the lights on and off with the exception of the above dead battery. CONCLUSION: Honestly, I would give this thing a 3.5/5, but I will round it up to 4/5 since that isn't an option. It does what I bought it for, turns the lights on and off, but it seems like there is a lot of missed potential. If they ever update the app to add more functionality to this thing, I will try my best to remember to update the review.
