Smart bulbs can transform your home into an exciting, automated wonderland—but only if your family members agree to stop flipping light switches. Nokia’s solution is to skip the smart bulbs entirely. Its new line of Smart Lighting switches add dimming, automation, and voice control to an entire room, and can be flipped on and off by family members without any consequence.
Smart switches are nothing new; they’re basically just old-fashioned dimmer switches that connect to an app for smart functionality. This allows you to save money (a smart switch is cheaper than a room’s worth of smart bulbs) and add brains to a room without hearing complaints from the people you live with.
While Nokia’s Smart Lighting products aren’t as cheap as TP-Link’s, they’re still fairly affordable at $55 to $60 each, and sport a compelling “European” design with some useful features. The Smart Lighting Keypad is a particularly interesting product, as it can save four lighting presets to each of its buttons (which you can customize with engravings). You can even program these buttons to control Smart Lighting across your entire home, sort of like a remote control panel.
While smart switches are fairly easy to install, you will need to purchase a Smart Lighting Bridge if you want to unlock the smart functionality of Nokia’s products. While it may seem like an annoyance, this bridge should ensure full coverage across your home, even when your router is acting up. Nokia says that its Smart Lighting products work with Google Assistant and Alexa, with HomeKit support arriving in the future.
You can pre-order Nokia’s Smart Lighting devices now on the Smartlabs website. They should ship sometime in September. Bear in mind that dimming functionality requires dimmable bulbs, and that smart bulbs will not work with Nokia’s lighting products.
