Gadgetory

am seen attract wrists you might remember last year when I reviewed even human led this is a color-changing smart LED from taboo that you could control over your phone's Bluetooth connection well this year taboo is back with the Loom mini and this is a smaller size bulb it does the same thing you can control it over your phone and automate it have a come on at certain times and do a lot of fun things when it comes to color now the Loom mini is called the Loom mini for a reason it's a smaller bulb and it uses a lot less power just three watts but it does a great job with green and blue and red all the colors that you would want and that puts it at a bit of an advantage over Philips hue which we've seen struggle to put an accurate green and a bright vivid blue out one feature I like that uses the Bluetooth well is that the blue mini can sense your proximity and so you'll see if I wake my phone up here in the bulb the text and I'm in range the color will change automatically to red just like that once you've got the lumen app opened up you'll be able to switch to whatever color you like on this full spectrum you'll also be able to put on a disco mode that will flash the light at different brightnesses and different speeds or one of my favorite features and they didn't have this last time I reviewed the lumen bulb is you can do a music mode in my test music sync works really well and it's kind of fun going through your music collection and figuring out which songs worked best one feature that didn't work out so well was an incoming call sensor that'll flash the light a certain color as your phone rings I couldn't get that to work and that was the same problem I encountered last year with the lumen LED one important distinction about the Loom mini is that it doesn't have any white diodes inside of it and that's a big difference from the lumen LED which does it only has that red green and blue mix of light and so you can't get pure white incandescent style light you can get whitish light by mixing the colors and you can get yellowish light that's also sort of incandescent esque but it's not going to be that pure perfect incandescent replacement type light that you're hoping for the loo mini relies on bluetooth 4.0 to work so you're going to need an iPhone 4s or better there's also an Android app and if you have an Android device that has Bluetooth 4.0 and Android 4.3 it'll work but keep in mind that the Android app isn't as updated as the iOS app at this point you don't get the music sink mode right now as well as other features that you get if you have an iOS device all in all this is a fun bulb that does a good job with colors and it's only $35 that is a great price point if you're a casual lighting enthusiast or someone who just wants to experiment with color changing lighting this is a much more affordable entry point great for a party great for syncing up with your music it's gonna do all that just fine I say that makes it a winner for CNET I'm right Chris