Philips Hue announced a bunch of new things today. From a new Security Center, Matter compatibility, and a new generation of the Festiva string lights. Philips Hue is one of the leaders of smart lights and LED light solutions, so it’s great to see them expanding their offerings and scope.
New Device – Philips Hue Secure Cameras
Philips Hue announced it’s initial offering into the smart camera market today with their new Philips Hue Secure cameras. You can use their new cameras to monitor your home in real time and get motion notifications, or use the Security Center in the app to trigger light and sound alarms. The Philips Hue secure cameras have 1080p HD video feeds with night vision to help you see the feeds clearly. These cameras feature event recognition on device – so detecting people, pets, or packages happens on the camera itself. This means that your recordings aren’t being shipped off to the cloud to be processed, a big win for security and privacy. Philips Hue Secure cameras come in both a battery and wired version, and are able to be used indoors or outdoors.
New Device – Philips Hue Secure Contact Sensor
Another new device from Philips Hue is their Secure contact sensor. This device sends real time notifications to the Philips Hue app when whatever they are attached to is opened or closed – be it a door, window, gate, garage door, or more. Whenever the base unit is moved too far away from it’s other half, the device is considered “open”. Switches like these can be used in numerous places and can be connected to automation to do some really cool things like automatically turn on the lights when a closet is opened.
Updated Device – Philips Hue Festavia String Lights
Philips is also releasing an updated model for their Festavia string lights line. These lights can be used both indoors or outdoors and now features all of the color combos that Philips Hue lights are so well known for. These lights come in multiple lengths: 100 LEDS at 8 meters, 250 LEDs at 20 meters, and 500 LEDS at 40 meters. There are also three new light effects just for the Festavia line, glisten, Prism, and Opal. These new light effects are backwards compatible with the previous generation of Festavia lights too.
Matter Finally Rolls Out
Finally, Philips Hue announced a date for Matter to be available for all of their devices. They had previously announced that Matter was coming, but had to push the launch date out. There is a new date for Matter to be available, starting in September 2023. This will be a software update to the Philips Hue Bridge for updating this.
For more information about Philips Hue’s products, check out their page here.
