Budget smart home device manufacturer Wyze has done it again, announcing it is taking orders on an $8 smart light bulb. The bulb, now available for pre-order exclusively through the app in a limited access run, ships in June.
During the pre-order period, you can only buy a four-pack of bulbs for $30 (which saves you $2 per bulb). After the pre-order sale, you’ll be able to purchase both the four-pack for $30 and other bulbs separately for $8 a piece.
The bulb is controllable via If This Then That, Google Home, and Alexa as well as Wyze’s app. Its maximum brightness is 800 lumens, and the initial bulb can only produce white light — no word on whether or not the company plans to produce a color bulb in the future.
Where this bulb shines (pardon our pun) is the ability to adjust the temperature of the white light, though. Philips Hue’s white ambiance bulbs allow you to do this, but they are more expensive than the standard hue white bulb at $25 a piece. Here, Wyze is giving you the same functionality at about a third of the price.
The features include a vacation mode to randomly turn bulbs on and off when to make it appear as if your house is still occupied, scheduling functionality, brightness, and temperature adjustment, and the ability to be triggered by motion detected via Wyze’s cameras or sensors.
Wyze’s smart home products are notable for their low prices. First was a $20 web camera with surprisingly good motion detection in 2017, followed last year by an improved version with better picture quality last year, and a camera with motorized panning capabilities soon after for just $10 more. And that’s not including the $20 set of smart home sensors Wyze released recently.
We haven’t had the opportunity yet to see these bulbs in person and test out their functionality, especially that ability to adjust color temperature. The price almost seems too good to be true, but the same thing could be said for just about anything Wyze has released over the past two years. Every time, Wyze delivered on what it had promised, and surprisingly well. We’ll see in a month or so if the Wyze Bulb is an exception to our previous positive experiences with the Wyze line.
