Near is a Singapore company that specializes in making smart lights, which are capable of providing you the same feature set and performance as the Philips Hue lights. The Near Smart Bulb is a E27 Wi-Fi enabled light bulb which you can customise from up to 16 million colours, with an accompanying app to provide smart lighting control and features. The Near Smart Bulb retails at S$19.90.
Tech specs
| Near Smart Bulb | Philips Hue White and Colour Ambiance Smart Bulb E27 | |
| Bulb Fitting | E27 | E27 |
| Power | 7W | 10W |
| Light Colour | 16 Million Colours + Full range of White (3000K – 6500K) | 16 Million Colours + Full range of White (2000K-6500K) |
| Brightness | 600 Lumen | 800 lumens |
| Lifetime | 25,000 hours | 25,000 hours |
| Warranty | 2 years | 2 years |
| Price | S$19.90 | S$89.00 |
As you can see, the Near Smart Bulb presents a fantastic value proposition over the Philips Hue counterpart. And remember you still have to get the S$89 Philips Bridge to access smart lighting and controls.
Unboxing
The Near Smart Bulb comes in a simple box which literally contains just the bulb and small instruction 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. It is similar to how you setup the Near Smart Strip Light.
Once you have the app installed, screw on the light bulb. Turn on and off the power multiple times until the lights start to flash repeatedly. Ensure that your Wi-Fi on your smartphone is connected to 2.4GHz network. Go into the app to connect to the smart light strip.
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.
Light quality
Even though the bulb is rated at 600 lumens, just a little bit higher than that of the Strip Light, it is actually much brighter than the light strip. However, do not expect the Smart Bulb to light up an entire room. It would take about two bulbs to properly brighten up a typical room.
Light customisation
White and warm light
Unlike the Near Smart Strip Light, the Near Smart Bulb has a “White Light” mode, where it is able to emit white to warm light from a range of 3000K – 6500K. You can also adjust the brightness. Check out the video demo below:
Your choice from 16 million colours
Once you got the light connected to the Near app, you can customisable the colours of the Smart Bulb to your liking. Like the Philips Hue, you can only customize the light strip 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. Unlike the “scenes” of the Light Strip, all the “scenes” of the Smart Bulb are customisable in terms of colour choice, warmness, and colour flash mode and frequency. The names and icon of the scene can also be renamed and changed.
Music reactive colours
There is also a mode called “Music” where the colours will change according to the music. This relies on the microphone on your phone for it to work and if your phone is in standby mode, the light colour will remain unchanged. Personally, it a little gimmicky and I do not think I will really use it.
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 for 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 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 which the app gives you a choice of setting to “white mode”, “colour mode”, “scene” or “music mode”.
You can also run actions like switching on/off, giving the light a countdown to turn off, or changing the brightness and temperature of the light. Do note that the brightness and temperature settings can only work if the Smart Bulb is set to “white mode”.
The task that can be carried out are not limited to one light. If you own more than one Near Smart Bulb, 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 Strip 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 Bulbs 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 Light Strip 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 blue” for example. This is way faster than going into the app can selecting the colour from the colour wheel. Check out the video demo below:
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 place my Near Smart Bulb and Light Strip 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
The app experience for the Smart Bulb seems to be more polished and complete than the Light Strip. 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 Bulb 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 life. At just S$19.90, it is really a no-brainer to choose Near Smart Bulb as it is more than 4x cheaper and have the same essential smart features than the Philips Hue Bulb. Why buy one Philips Hue bulb when you can get 4 Near Smart Bulbs and start setting an ambience in your house!