Philips Illuminate

The concept is great, but the "customize" feature is extremely limited and does not allow you to design patterns or use any function other than cycling through solid sets of color. It would also be nice if you could pick which combinations you wanted to cycle through for the standard light display.

I bought the starter kit and 3 add on strings to test out. Of all the color changing lights on the market that are designed to be plug and play, this has the most features and capability, but there are many things I'd like to do, but the programming does not allow for it. The setup is pretty straight forward and works well with the app. The programming can be done directly through the lights or over your home wifi. A HUGE advantage of this product over some others out there is that you can plug these lights end to end and have the whole series of strings in perfect sync within the programming. As far as quality goes, out of the four light strings I bought, I have two defective bulbs on two different strings. For those not familiar, these are RGB lights, which means each bulb has a red, blue and green LED which can be combined in different proportions to make over 16 million possible colors on each light. One downside to this technology is that the RGB lights must be wired into the string and you cannot replace the bulbs like on the old fashioned lights. For those who know how to solder, you could buy an extra light string for repairs and cut out a defective light and solder in a replacement as needed. There are 20 programmed functions with 17 of them Christmas themed, 2 Halloween themed and 1 for 4th of July. There is also a cycle function that will loop through all 17 Christmas functions. However what is really lacking is the ability to pick your favorite functions and cycle between them. I like the ability to cycle through functions as it adds a nice variety. The problem is many of them are quite lame and who wants to put that up on your house! Most of the functions themselves are very basic, but a few of them take better advantage of the ability to have colors chase up and down the string. You can also adjust the speed of the chasing which is a nice touch. The customize features are very basic and really need to be improved. This was my biggest disappointment in these lights. Basically all you can have the string do is cycle between colors of your choosing. You can pick any color imaginable on the color wheel and then tell it what order you want them in. You can tell it to jump between colors or fade into the next color and you can adjust the speed that it does this at. The real limitation here is that you cannot create your own functions or have your colors perform any of the built in chasing effects or twinkling effects. If Philips could update the app to address the shortcomings, then this would be by far the best plug and play RGB light product available.

Such a cool system. Easy to set up and the app is intuitive. It needs more interesting functions though.

The ap and lights are great, however, they are not without flaws. The biggest being the lack of ability to customize the color/function of the lights when you chose to use the music function. I would like to use the purple and orange chasing function for Halloween with some music from The Nightmare Before Christmas, but the ap won't allow me to do so. If this were corrected, this would be a five star system for sure.