New LED bulb enables wireless light control, personalized with smartphone or tablet app

Building on its innovation capabilities, today Philips unveils hue, the world's smartest web-enabled LED home lighting system. Philips hue signals a new era in home lighting both in the way we think about and experience light in our homes. It allows you to create and control the light using your smartphone or tablet. Bringing endless possibilities to help you get creative and help you personalize your lighting to suit yours and your family's lifestyle, Philips hue is available exclusively from Apple stores from 30th October. A starter pack includes three bulbs that simply screw into your existing lamps, and a bridge that you plug into your home Wi-Fi router. Simply download the hue app to start experiencing light in a completely new way.

Philips hue can be setup in minutes. The intuitive app allows you to remotely control your home lighting to help secure your home, personalize your home lighting experience with custom settings and program timers to help manage your daily schedules, all through the convenience of a smart device. An intuitive and seamless system, Philips hue is upgradeable and future-proof, with the potential for more features to be downloaded and enjoyed in the future.

With its high quality energy-saving LED light, Philips hue allows you to tune shades of white light or create any color. In addition, Philips hue can:

• Save your favorite light scenes for each room or time of day and recall them in an instant
• Use any photo on your phone as a color palette to paint your room with light and bring your memories back to life
• Tune white light from warm candlelight to vibrant, cool white light
• Create ambience or complement your decor with the colors of the rainbow
• Control and monitor your lights remotely when not at home for security and peace of mind
• Set timers to help manage your daily routine
• Let light wake you up refreshed or help your loved ones fall asleep

The app for Philips' hue also features expert LightRecipes:  four pre-programmed lighting settings based on Philips' research around the biological effects that lighting has on the body.  These scenarios adjust bulbs to the optimum shade and brightness of white light to help you relax, read, concentrate or energize.

Jeroen de Waal, Head of Marketing & Strategy at Philips Lighting commented:  "Philips hue is a game-changer in lighting – a completely new way to experience and interact with light. In the way phones, media and entertainment have been revolutionized by digital technology, now we can also personalize light and enjoy limitless applications.  Philips continues to redefine the possibilities of LED technology, and hue pushes the boundaries even more, not only in offering great light quality, but in how lighting can be digitized and integrated with our world to further simplify and enhance our lives."  

In home tests conducted in New York, Berlin and Shanghai, users highlighted hue's great quality light, programmable timers and the fact they could control their lighting from outside the home as features they most appreciated.  Moreover, consumers liked the ability to save personal light settings and recreate them at the touch of a button as well as the convenience of managing their lighting from their mobile device.

Philips is opening up the hue app to the developer community and has created an open source platform at www.meethue.com  inviting developers to explore the app and unleash even more possibilities to show what light can do to enhance your life. You can share light scenes or get inspired on the meethue.com community site. Philips hue uses the open ZigBee Light Link standard so that it can be integrated with other ZigBee certified systems.

Building on the success of its AmbiLight experience, Philips is developing future product features, such as allowing hue to integrate with other media including sound and video.  Philips is also working on features such as geo-location services, allowing hue to sense when you are close to home and automatically turn on the lights, or turn them off when you leave.   

Philips hue is available only from Apple stores and Apple.com for $ 199 / € 199 / £179. To find out more, visit www.meethue.com.