We’ve known for some time that there was major news on the way from Philips Hue, and the company has now announced all of the details.
One of the headline features is a new Bridge Pro which turns your existing smart bulbs into motion sensors. Bulbs also get more affordable, light strips get brighter, and there’s support for Matter-over-Thread. Finally, the smart doorbell leaked earlier in the year is now official …
Plans to turn existing Philips Hue light bulbs into motion sensors were leaked at the beginning of this year. We also discovered there was a smart doorbell on the way through an update to the Hue app.
Turning existing Hue bulbs into motion sensors
Although you won’t need to update any of your bulbs to get this new functionality, you will need to swap out your existing Hue Bridge for the new Bridge Pro.
This is a $90 purchase, but there are some other new features to help ease the pain. The Verge reports that It can support three times as many devices and store over 500 lighting scenes to provide faster response times.
[It adds] features like lighting scenes, dynamic effects, schedules, and out-of-home control. Sporting a new black look, it has a faster processor, more memory, and increased capacity. Designed to appeal to Hue super-users, it can connect 150 lights and 50 accessories (a soft limit) […] Additionally, the Pro can store over 500 custom lighting scenes and provide faster response times […] The Pro finally brings Wi-Fi (2.4GHz) to a Hue bridge, so it doesn’t have to sit next to your router.
If your head aches at the thought of reconfiguring all your Hue devices to swap bridges, the company says that a migration tool will transfer all of the settings for you. If you have multiple bridges, then you’ll want to hold fire for a while as there will be support for migrating these to a single Bridge Pro by the end of the year.
Hue Secure smart doorbell
The new Hue Secure Doorbell is intended to compete with Ring and Nest by offering a higher resolution 2K fisheye camera. Engadget reports that it also includes 24-hour video history without a subscription.
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