LIFX L3A19LW06E26CA White, A19 Wi-Fi Smart LED Light Bulb, Warm, Dimmable, No Bridge Required, Works with Amazon Alexa, Hey Google, Apple HomeKit

This is my review for the LIFX White, A19 Wi-Fi Smart LED Light Bulb. I ordered this on August 12th 2020, but with the current state of shipping and delivery it didn’t arrive until August 25th. My wife and I have been in the process of making our house more ‘convenient’ with smart devices linked to our multiple Amazon Echos. We started almost two years ago with Etekcity plugs. While an interesting entry point to creating a smart home, we found Etekcity would routinely fall off the network and force us to move furniture to gain access to the plugs to reset them.During a later trip to Costco, I picked up a multi pack of Feit electric LED smart bulbs. I genuinely hoped these would provide us with the lighting and convenience we were looking to create. I was wrong. We still have two Feit bulbs in our living room, but the other two bulbs that came with the pack are still sitting on the shelf. The Feit bulbs we bought took days (literally) to set up. We have a higher-end-of-the-spectrum Netgear Nighthawk Smart Wi-Fi Router Model R7000 and superfast connectivity for our home capable of streaming 4K video with speeds that routinely clock over 100 Mbps. It was very difficult to establish connectivity with the Feit bulbs, which is why I never bought more even at a great Costco price. My wife and I finally found what we were looking for with LIFX. After my experience with Feit, I have very little patience in trying to set up another smart device. For the customer who claims they had a hard time connecting to a 5G router, the issue is NOT the LIFX bulbs. Most people probably aren’t aware that just because you have a high end router and dozens of smart/connected devices this doesn’t guarantee success. You also have to pay for service that allows for this much usage without bottlenecking your devices. The LIFX A19 is the fourth LIFX bulb we installed in the master bedroom. It took less than 5 minutes to automatically be recognized on the network (WITHOUT having to hold it close to the router, as some smart bulbs recommend) and pop-up on our Amazon Alexa skills. It is a perfect bulb for our bedroom floor lamp/reading lamp. It dims from 0-100%, and covers the spectrum of white light (warm, day, etc.) effortlessly. We also have a LIFX A19 (1100 lumens!) full spectrum color LED bulb that we use in the Master Bedroom and we could not be happier. When my wife and I first started using smart devices to make our home “more convenient” I found myself routinely lamenting that Etekcity and Feit made my life far more ‘inconvenient’ than just using a light switch. However, since installing LIFX around the house (to include their full spectrum light strips behind our flat screen TV for ambient theater lighting), I see the future of making your home ‘smart’ has less do with your architect, and more to do with how quickly Amazon can ship.

After making sure my iPhone was on the 2.4 Wi-Fi band, and not the 5G band (I had to tell my iPhone to 'forget' the 5G Wi-Fi during the setup process temporatily), this bulb was quickly recognized by Apple HomeKit. This was my first Apple HomeKit device, but it will not be my last! The Apple HomeKit app is very intuitive, and I was easily able to name my lamp, add it to a Room, add a new Scene, and set up an Automation to have the lamp with the LiFx bulb turn ON automatically 30 minutes prior to Sunset each weekday, and automatically turn OFF a specific number of hours later. I have able to ask Siri to turn the light on/off from multiple devices, including iPhone, iPad, and Apple Watch. I can even set the brightness percentage via Siri or within the Apple HomeKit app. "Hey Siri, turn the Lamp on at 50%". This bulb is only white, not one with 16 million different colors, but this is exactly what I wanted - an easily controllable, dimmable white LED bulb. At this price on Amazon, it's less expensive and certainly less cumbersome than using a timer plugged into the wall outlet. This bulb fit perfectly fine in a small lamp. At 10% brightness, it provides nice ambient lighting, and makes a great reading lamp at 100%. I am looking forward to adding more LiFX smart bulbs to the family. There was nothing extra to buy, like the bridge required by some other manufacturers, such as the Philiips Hue. I know there also a separate LiFX app, but I can do everything necessary from Apple HomeKit, so I haven't even downloaded that. I recommend this LiFX smart white bulb, especially for anyone looking to get started using Apple HomeKit.

1st. This bulb is warm white. You can't change it to bright white. This is why it's so cheap. 2nd, lifx has always had a poor set up process. On Android, it's either works the first time or you have to set it up over and over again until it actually finds the bulbs and connects.Eventually it works, but it's annoying it's been this way for years and they've never bothered to fix it. If you are on iphone, good luck. Iphone has a mandatory wait time of over 15 minutes if you don't want to use the apple home app. Even then, the set up never worked. It just didn't. I didn't want to use apple home so it's never worked. Used an Android phone and eventually got the bulbs to connect.Lifx has great quality bulbs. I have over 6 bulbs, 4 of them over 3 years old at this point. They've all been left on way longer than they should be. Still work fine to this day. Google home does not work well with these bulbs, Alexa works great. Only time I've had a problem is when the power went out multiple times and had to manually connect all again. If the power goes out once, the bulbs can connect back automatically, only when it's multiple times will the bulbs lose the connection.

Super quick and easy to pair to Apple HomePod and all Amazon Alexa devices. Now I can be even lazier now that all I have to do is ask Siri or Alexa “Siri/Alexa, turn off bedroom light” or “Siri/Alexa, dim bedroom light 50%” lol. But all in all, the lightbulb itself is a nice, bright and crisp light at 100% and at 50% dim it’s a nice and warm, cozy lighting. They also seem to be heavy duty too. Like, I feel if I dropped it from from about 3’-4’ it wouldn’t shatter as most bulbs would(I don’t suggest trying though lol). It fits pretty much all sockets light fixtures requires.I also love the fact that I could be on my way home and ask Siri or Alexa on my phone to turn on front door light and kitchen light at night so it’s even easier to do such simple tasks that I never would’ve thought could get much easier than motion activated lighting. I could literally be in a different city and turn my lights on and off. How cool is that?! Don’t know how necessary it is to do that unless you have a smart door cam and see strangers at your door and want to scare them off. HIGHY RECOMMENDED!