Xiaomi Smart Bulb Color Review

Oct 22, 2024

This is where I would place the list of topics to cover, however, because of how insanely specific the purpose of a lightbulb is, there's really just not much to talk about. A grand total of two entire topics, in fact. The software, and the brightness. So I'll take a more unconventional approach, where I just share my thoughts directly without much structure.

Regular lightbulb

Now part of why I wanted to upgrade to this lightbulb was because my existing ones were really dim, and even with 4 of them, it was still difficult to actually light up my room. On top of this, they were orange, which meant their existing brightness was getting capped by the fact that they weren't even covering the full wavelength of colour. This, mixed with the fact that I had a special offer for a free purchase up to 20€, led me to picking up the Xiaomi Smart Bulb Color.

Coming in at just 13€ a bulb, this beats many offerings by other companies, such as Philips. My friend owns a Philips Hue, and upon me bringing up the lightbulb to my friend group, he was shocked at how insanely cheap it was. His cost 60€ and had limited colours, mine was just 13 and had full RGB colour support. This is one of the aspects I really like about Xiaomi's home device solutions - they're way cheaper than the competition at roughly the same featureset.

Now, this lightbulb kinda requires you to use the app, but you can always get around that. Because of how it works, you can use it as a regular one just fine so long as you don't pair it, and if you do, you can also just keep it always on and then just use the light switch as if it weren't smart, at the cost of not being able to remotely turn it on.

The default colour temperature seemed similar to roughly 5000K, and was perfectly between warm and cold, and the default brightness was a magnitude above my old bulbs.

Becoming smart

The setup process is a little confusing. The light bulb should go to pair mode on first turn-on, but it did not for me. I had to reset it (turn it on and off in 1 second intervals 5 times, as per the manual) before I could actually pair it. Which was even more painful, because it kept on failing. Only after I retried the entire pairing process did it actually understand that I wanted to pair it, and I've had not one issue since.

The companion app is the same as in every Xiaomi home appliance - the Xiaomi Home app. The controls are versatile, and for most of what you would do day-to-day (i.e., turn the bulb on / off, change brightness, or colour temperature) can be done from the control center shortcut - a huge benefit of HyperOS. You can also use Google Assistant (now Gemini) to set up routines. I, for one, have made a routine so that at 6:00, when it's time to wake up, it goes to a very dim and warm colour. Good enough to help me navigate my room if I do wake up, but not enough to blind me. Then, 10 minutes later, it moves to the default setting of max brightness and 5000K that I have set up. And lastly, at 6:45, when I would have left my house, it turns it off, in case I forgot.

But sometimes I have to leave early, and if you forgot to turn off the lights normally and left your home, you'd be out of luck and have to go back if you wanted to turn it off. Not with this lightbulb. At the cost of some security, Xiaomi lets you control the lightbulb from anywhere in the world. I remembered that I had left the light on this morning, and by the time I realized, I was already in Warsaw, 450 kilometers away. But because I had mobile data, I was able to connect to the lightbulb and turn it off from this distance. This is because the bulb comes with a WiFi module that lets it connect to a network, where it can then await commands.

And if you want to, you can also use the older control center design, which has a few features missing from the normal design, such as the GAMER mode (Not actually called that), where the lights will change colour in an RGB pattern. Not much practical use for me, but if you want to have a party, it's great. You can also customize the pattern, it doesn't have to be RGB.

Closing thoughts

To conclude this insanely tiny review, I love this thing. For just 13€, it is very much worth your money and offers a vast featureset.