Philips have announced a major new update for their Hue app on Android and iOS scheduled to begin rolling out later this month. The update brings with it preset light scenes tuned by lighting designers as well as ease of use improvements.
The simpler navigation will allow you to light your home smarter with less taps, in the update you can now either change the colour or set a scene from the last four used on an individual globe or a room.
Philips is also making it easier to set the mood with the update, provided you use their coloured light globes, with a new colour picker. The improved picker will let you group or ungroup lights in a room, as well as choose the exact shade of white, or colours you want from a palette.
Finally, Philips is adding 30 new scenes developed by their lighting designers, allowing you to pick from scenes like ‘a sunset in Honolulu or a night out in London’s Soho district’ to match your current mood, or social situation. You can also create your own scenes more easily with options to extract the relevant colours from your favourite pictures and then intelligently apply that scheme to your lights – effectively bringing your photos to life.
Jasper Vervoort, Head of Marketing and Product Management, Home Systems & Luminaires at Philips Lighting said of the upcoming updates
We’ve made our smart home lighting even smarter. Our new look app is easier to use than ever. New features include shortcuts which make setting up rooms a breeze, new colour pickers as well as 30 new scenes that allow instant scene setting to match your mood or that special moment. In designing the upgrade, we took advice from lighting designers, user experience specialists and, most importantly, from our customers. The result is an app befitting the world’s most loved smart home lighting system.
Philips says that the update will be rolling out later this month through Google Play and the iOS app store, so keep an eye out for it.
