1byone Bluetooth speaker and LED bulb review
If you’ve ever looked at a lightbulb and thought that there was room for improvement, it’s finally here in the 1byone Bluetooth speaker and LED bulb.
The 1byone Bluetooth speaker and LED bulb screws into a regular light socket and then is controlled by a smartphone if you want to do anything fancy with it. It can play music pretty well and at a distance, and changes colors and brightness from the app.
I’ve currently removed a rather large speaker, power adapter, cell phone, cell phone power supply from my toddler’s room (it played her nighttime music) and replaced a bulb in a lamp with this. I can now control the lights in my toddler’s room and play her nighttime music from one device located in another room.
The bulb is on the large side. I don’t think the product pictures convey just how large it is. It’s over three inches wide, which is over half an inch larger than your standard a-19 bulb. This means if you’ve got a tight squeeze with a normal bulb, you’ll be too large with this.
The app that you’re lead to by the QR code on the box is hosted on a third party website which requires you to enable installation from unknown sources. The product description page on Amazon tells you to look for CHSmartBulb, but that doesn’t exist in the Google Play Store. What does exist is JBSmartBulb, which appears to be an updated version of what’s on the third party website.
The app is simple enough a toddler can enjoy it to change up color. Any audio played on the phone that’s connected to it will play on the bulb, but the app does include a music player. I generally just use Google Play Music to stream her cached nighttime music, so no worries.
Although it’s a smart LED bulb, some things about it do leave features to be desired. You can only connect to and control one bulb at a time, and only a bulb that’s in range. If you take your media device out of range it will no longer play music. It would be really nice to see this with WiFi integration where you could use it as a UPnP speaker or some such. There’s also no way to control the light that I can tell from a laptop or computer. You can play music, but that’s where that ends.
If you have a spare device dedicated to music and light control, it’s pretty sweet. I do, I’ve got an old deactivated cell phone that does some household tasks such as playing baby music, storing security camera snapshots, etc. If I just had my phone, I think I’d find it fairly limited.
Overall the 1byone Bluetooth speaker and LED bulb is a pretty neat little product.
The 1byone Bluetooth speaker and LED bulb is available from Amazon for $30.99
