Gadgetory

hi I'm rich Brown first CNET with the topic for a holiday gift guide for the appliances category and for this category we've chosen the Philips hue connected bulbs starting pack this is a set of three led lightbulbs and they come with a controller that you connect to your home wireless network so once it's all set up you can use your smart phone or connect a mobile device to control these lights and all kinds of interesting and fun ways so behind me you'll see these four lights each of them has a hue bulb in it and they light up pretty much like you'd expect from a traditional light bulb it looks great there's a whole range of color temperatures you can set if you wanted to go from a warmer light to a bluer light it all looks pretty comfortable and familiar but dig into the app and you'll see you can make the lights be a little more festive now we got colors you can set a whole different range of programming options for these lights you can set individual bulbs or groups of bulbs to go off on either a timer with an alarm or the geolocation feature that ties into your smartphone's gps and it will tell the lights to shut off if you leave the house or turn on when you come back home for more advanced users hue ties into the IFFT standard which is IFTTT or if this then that which is a service that ties into all kinds of different online services like Facebook and Twitter and through IFFT you can tell your lights to blink every time you're tagged in a Facebook post or maybe turn green when your particular stock is up all kinds of different options are available through IFFT and it's really fun to play with if you have the time so the reason the hue bulbs are our top pick for this category is because even though there are about a year old there's still one of the most fun smart home devices that we've seen it's easy to install easy to set up and everyone pretty much gets it whether you want to use the hue as a standard light bulb or maybe a more fun sort of party novelty there's a whole lot of appeal here and the price at 199 isn't really that bad it's something we'd all like to receive as a gift and for that reason it's our top pick for this category so I'm rich brown this is the philips hue connected bulbs starting pack