Near is a Singapore company that specializes in making smart lights. Smart lights are getting popular with the advent of building a smart home and the inception of the Phillips Hue lighting series. Also, those customised lights behind a desk or under a sofa just looks stunning and help to set a particular mood.
However, Phillips Hue products are actually quite expensive. Take the Phillips Hue LightStrip for example. That light strip costs S$129 and you still have to pay an additional S$89 for the Bridge in order to access the smart controls and features, so that amounts to a whopping S$218.
What if you can get that exact same setup for just S$39.90? Introducing the Near Smart Strip Light, which a smart Wi-Fi enabled light strip. And best part, there is a lot of smart features that you can do with the free accompanying app.
Tech specs
| Near Smart Strip Light | Philips Hue LightStrip Plus | |
| Length | 2 meters | 2 meters |
| Dimension (HxW) | 3.5mm x 10mm | 4.0mm x 14mm |
| Light Colour | RGB (16 million colours) | RGB (16 million colours) |
| Brightness | 800 lumens | 1,600 lumens |
| Voltage | AC 100-240V | AC 100-240V |
| Maximum Extension | 10 meters | 10 meters |
| Lifetime | 25,000 hours | 20,000 hours |
| Warranty | 2 years | 2 years |
| Price | S$39.90 | S$129.00 |
Do remember you still have to buy the Philips Bridge for smart control features for S$89! This makes the Near Smart Strip Light a great deal!
Unboxing
The Near Smart Strip Light comes in a simple box that contains that following:
- Near Smart Strip Light (2m)
- Power adapter
- Setup card
Setup
The setup process is quite straightforward. You will need to download the Near app and register as a user in order for you to access the smart features and controls.
Once you have the app installed, connect the lights to the power adapter and plug it into the power socket. Turn on and off the power multiple times until the lights start to flash repeatedly. Alternatively, you can long press on the lights remote for five seconds. Ensure that your Wi-Fi on your smartphone is connected to 2.4GHz network. Go into the app to connect to the Near Smart Strip Light.
Do I need to be connected to 2.4GHz network in order to control the light?
That was my initial worry as I am always using a 5.0GHz network. But I’m glad to say that you not need to be connected to the 2.4GHz network. In fact, as long as your smartphone is connected to the internet (even mobile data), you can control the light! You just need the 2.4GHz network for the initial setup.
Too short or too long?
Near Smart Strip Light comes default with 2 metres in length. If the strip is too long, you can cut off the excess strip at the copper points. And if it is too short, you can increase the length of the strip by up to 10 metres by purchasing the 1-metre Extension Strip for just S$9.90! Simply link the extension with the terminal connecting unit of your existing Near Smart Strip Light and you are good to go.
Light quality
The light that emits from the strip is consistent and well distributed. Each bulb produces an equal amount of brightness and colour accuracy. As this is only 800 lumens, do not expect the Near Smart Strip Light to light up your entire room. But since it is meant to create a particular ambience or mood that you desire, I think the brightness it enough.
Light customisation
Your choice from 16 million colours
Once you got the light connected to the Near app, you can customise the colours of the Near Smart Strip Light to your liking. Like the Philips Hue, you can only customize the Near Smart Strip Light to emit single colour.
You customise the colour by circling through a spectrum of colour from the colour wheel. Check out the video demo below:
After choosing a colour, you adjust the brightness and warmness of the colour via two sliders below. Check out the video demo below:
These customisations allow you to choose from up to 16 million possible colours. Once you have selected a colour from the colour wheel, that colour will be your default colour if you run an action to switch the colour mode of the light to be “colour”.
Preset scenes of colors
The Near app also includes 8 presets called ‘Scene‘ which are pre-designed colour schemes and moods. 4 of which (Night, Reading, Party, Leisure) are fixed, while the remaining 4 (Soft, Rainbow, Shine, Gorgeous) are customisable in terms of colour choice, warmness, and pulsing frequency. Unfortunately, the names of the customisable scenes cannot be renamed.
App and Smart features
The Near app is packed with many useful and smart features that can make your life much easier. Let’s get into each feature.
Home and Room Management
If you plan to own more than one smart light from Near, then this feature allows you categorize each lighting product into a particular room or house. This reduces clutter on the main screen on the app, letting you view and control your lights by rooms so you don’t have scroll through a long list of lights.
Scheduling turn on/off
You can schedule your lights to turn on or off when it reaches a certain time. And you can do so via two ways of scheduling. The first is through the individual light settings. The second is through a global setting whereby if you own more than one light you can turn all of them on/off when it hits a certain time.
Tap-to-Run sequence
“Tap-to-Run” allows you to create macros and save them as a shortcut, where once you tap on that shortcut, the light will do whatever you specify in your instruction sequence.
In the app, to create a “Tap-to-Run” sequence, you have to set the condition to “Click to execute”. After which, you proceed to choose a task to be carried out. An example of a task is to set the “colour” mode. The app gives you a choice of setting it to “colour mode” or one of the five “Scene” options. If you choose the task to activate “colour” mode, the Near Smart Strip Light will emit the last remembered colour which you set.
You can also run actions like switching on/off, or changing the brightness and temperature of the light. However, the brightness and temperature settings does not seem to work on the Near Smart Strip Light.
The task that can be carried out are not limited to one light. If you own more than one Near Smart Strip Light, you can configure the task to do two different things, such as one to turn red and one to turn blue.
If you’re using an iPhone, another great feature of this “Tap-to-Run” sequence is the ability to add to Siri Shortcuts. As such, you can run these actions via Siri and even with your own customised phrase. Check out the video demo below:
On the iPhone, your “Tap-to-Run” sequences will also show up on iPhone widgets if you enable the Near Shortcut Control widget on your home screen. This makes it convenient to activate the action without going into the app.
Automation
Automation is big and must-have feature set if you are buying a smart light. The setup of an automation action is the similar to a “Tap-to-Run” setup, but instead of selecting a “Click to execute” condition, you choose another condition from the list the app gives you.
The Automation setup is simply an “If this happens, then do that” setup. You can tell the light to switch on if the weather is raining, temperature is lower than 30°C, or when the sun sets. The condition can also be based on a device, such as, “if the Smart Light Bulb is turned on, then carry out this task”. You can also set the automated action to only run during a specified period of time, for example only during weekdays.
There is a wide variety of automated tasks that you can design, and the permutations of tasks will only increase with more Near Smart Lights that you own. The benefits of automation will only get more apparent with more lights you own in the Near ecosystem, and having your entire lighting system automated is surely an amazing setup.
Smart Assistant capable (ie. Google Assistant)
Another great feature of the Near ecosystem is the ability to integrate with Smart Assistants such as Alexa, Google Assistant, and even IFTTT. After linking to your Google Home setup, you can control your Near Smart Strip Light with easy commands.
The Google Assistant is particularly useful for changing the colours and brightness of the lights. You can easily change the colour of the light by simply telling Google to “set it to purple” for example. This is way faster than going into the app can selecting the colour from the colour wheel. Brightness is also much easier to change using a voice command than going into the app to adjust the slider. Check out the video demo below:
Another powerful feature of Google Home is the ability to organise the lights into a specified room. In my case, I have placed my Smart Bulb and Strip Light in a room called ‘Study’. So, when I tell Google to change the light colour in ‘Study’ to red for example, it will turn all the lights in ‘Study’ to red. Check out the video demo below:
Google Assistant seems to be able to activate your “Tap-to-Run” actions as long as you say “activate [name of action]”. But if you want to greater flexibility in your triggers, you can simply use IFTTT by linking it to Google Assistant and Near Light (Smart Life in IFTTT) to set up an Applet to do so.
Conclusion
Even though, the app has some minor imperfections such as the “Bright” and “Colour Temp” tasks having zero effect as the Near Smart Strip Light is not coded to output a “White” light mode, you should be to automate most of the essential functions.
If you want to get started in smart lighting for your home, or want to create interesting mood and ambience in your room, then the Near Smart Strip Light should be on your shortlist. It’s affordable and packs so many useful features in the app for customisation and automation. There is a really a lot of things you can design and customise to aid in your daily lifestyle habits.
To me, it is really a no-brainer to choose Near Smart Strip Light as it is almost 3x cheaper and have the same essential smart features than the Philips Hue LightStrip Plus. Best part? You’ll be supporting a Singapore company.