Philips Hue Essential A60 - Still Not Quite Smart Enough
A review of the Philips Hue Essential A60 smart bulbs highlights the ongoing challenges of smart home interoperability. Despite the promise of universal standards like Matter and Thread, the author notes that ecosystem integration remains inconsistent.
Why it matters
It highlights the gap between the marketing promise of 'universal' smart home standards and the actual user experience of managing fragmented IoT devices.
This is going to be a review of two halves.
And it's mostly because I've painted myself into an IoT corner.
When I first started testing smart home devices, most of them were very locked into their respective "ecosystems."
Apple TV and Apple HomePods used Siri to control other devices designed specifically to be Apple-friendly, with companion apps tailor-made for iOS.
If you wanted to control an Echo speaker or a Ring doorbell, that was a job for Alexa.
Nest cameras and doorbells only talked to Google Assistant.
And don't get me started on Samsung and SmartThings.
But all that's over now, right? Thanks to protocols like Matter and Thread, these days every smart device now integrates seamlessly with every other one, regardless of what brand, what type and what kind of virtual assistant you're controlling them with. Right?
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