When I was first asked to review the Yeelight Staria Bedside lamp to test out the beta Google Assistant Local Home Control I was expecting to say Ok Google Turn on/ off the lamp a few times, notice it was faster and then write a review saying, yes Assistant’s Local Home Control is faster (which it is). What I wasn’t expecting was a gorgeous lamp with a few hidden extras.
What’s a Yeelight you ask? Yeelight is Xiaomi’s design focused consumer lighting brand and comprises of good array to lighting products including lamps, strip lights, bulbs, down lights and even ceiling lights. While the full product catalogue is not officially available in Australia yet they do have plans to continue to expand local availability. The devices can you get locally can be found here.
The Staria Bedside Lamp loos like a traditional desk lamp, with a stark matte white finish. However just under the hood are a few cool features. The map shade is adjustable letting you pivot it up to act as direct reading lamp of face down as a room light. With LEDs on both sides of the “shade” the Staria can throw a bit of light.
It also includes a Qi wireless charging pad that adds just another feature that makes the lamp an overall winner. It also contains a lamp! Yes, this desks lamp is capable of emitting light. More importantly, it’s built-in ring of LEDs are capable for moving between cool and warm tones white light with a decent maximum brightness and a pleasing full dim.
You have 3 options for controlling the lamp, voice, touch and app control. As a headline feature, the Staria Bedside Lamp is Google Assistant-enabled, if you toggle on LAN control in the Yeelight app you then get Local Home Control which I felt was perceptibly faster. As expected there’s an app that lets you control it, and you can also control it via the Google Home app.
Finally, there’s a button on the devices itself. This is something a lot of smart device makers actually forget to add. The ability directly interact with a device is often necessary, and I’m glad Yeelight didn’t take it away. A quick tap on the button toggles the light on and off, where a long press activates the dimming feature.
The Google Assistant Local Home Control interface was fast, no sooner had Google acknowledged the end of my request with a little beep then the lamp would softly turn on or off. Unfortunately, Google Home devices still require an internet connection to work, but that too may change in time.
If I had one complaint about the Yeelight Staria Bedside Lamp it would be that the colour settings for the lamp seemed to be disregarded at certain times. For instance, using the on-device button to dim the lamp not only changed the brightness but scrolled through different colour temperatures as well. Apart from that, I was very taken with the device.
This being my first experience with Yeelight I have to say that I was very happy with the overall product. I’d love to play with a few more of their devices and see if the same quality and aesthetic style showed through.
I was just playing the the Yeelight app today and noticed the LAN Control option. I had no idea what it was so I ignored it, but will now have to go back in and turn it on. Thanks!
The Google home app does not support the same amount of colour combinations as the yeelight app, which means assistant doesn’t either.
The workaround is to create a scene in the yeelight app and then ask assistant to set your lights to that scene.