Philips Hue’s new smart outdoor light fixture harkens back to a simpler time

Spring is coming (soon, we promise), and smart lighting company Philips Hue has some new products that can help you spruce up your outdoor space, so you can enjoy spending more time outside when the ice finally melts.

Signify, which owns Philips Hue, has announced three new additions to its outdoor smart lighting line, all arriving in the US on March 1st, 2022. Plus, two new lighting effects are scheduled to arrive on the Hue app later this year to add features to its indoor smart bulbs.

The Philips Hue Inara wall light ($99.99, available on March 1st) is a vintage-style outdoor wall light featuring a filament bulb. Also known as an Edison bulb, a filament bulb has its “electric” filament visible through the bulb, resembling that first incandescent bulb designed by Thomas Edison.

This traditional look is popular in fixtures that feature an exposed bulb, and they’ve been everywhere indoors for a while now. This is the first outdoor version we’ve seen, but you can’t buy the outdoor bulb alone and pop it into an existing fixture since it’s only available inside the Inara’s black vintage-style lantern.

The Inara doesn’t have the color-changing options of Hue’s signature bulbs, instead, you can adjust the brightness of the filament bulb in the app, with a remote control (sold separately), or with your voice (it’s compatible with Amazon Alexa, Apple’s Siri, and Google Assistant voice assistants.)

Image: Signify

For something more colorful and a lot more contemporary, the new Lucca wall light ($99.99, available on March 1st) is an outdoor wall fixture with a round shape and black bands wrapped around it.

The Lucca offers white or color-changing light and is designed to be bold and bright, making it a good choice for smart lighting on a porch or balcony space where you want to be able to see what you’re doing.

Image: Signify

The third new product is the Resonate wall light in black (available March 1st for $159.99). This is more of an atmospheric addition, with a minimalist design that casts either white light or colored light up and down a wall. This type of light is commonly used for highlighting architectural features.

All the new light fixtures work with the Philips Hue app and require the Philips Hue Bridge for automations such as turning on the lights as you arrive home. Hue offers an outdoor motion sensor that can pair with any of its lights for automatic activation. Hue products also work with Amazon Alexa, Google Home, Samsung SmartThings, and Apple HomeKit smart home platforms.

Signify also announced that the Philips Hue app is getting an update in the first quarter of 2022. Two new effects are coming to the company’s indoor bulbs, candle and fireplace, which will let you set your Hue bulbs to mimic the glow of candlelight or a fireplace.

Third-party apps have offered these features for Hue bulbs for a while, and candlelight was part of the Hue’s Labs section of its app, but it’s now making its way to the main app. Candle and fireplace effects will work on all compatible Philips Hue lights (both the hub-based Zigbee versions and the stand-alone Bluetooth bulbs).