Nooie Aurora RGB Smart Bulbs (Hardware)
Official GBAtemp Review
Product Information:
RGB is Life.
Do you like RGB? Do you wish you could RGB your room, or even your entire house without having to spend a whole lot of money on something like the Philips Hue? Well Nooie has your back, with their latest line of RGB light bulbs, Nooie Aurora. Featuring color variance from 2800k-6000k, Alexa and Google Home voice integration, RGB controls without requiring a hub, and coming in at a whopping $48.99 USD for four bulbs, the Nooie Aurora seems like a very competitive set of smart RGB light bulbs, so what’s the catch?
First, we’ll take a look at what you get in the box when you order your own set of Noorie Aurora bulbs...which isn’t much, to be honest. You’ve got a quickstart guide and the bulbs themselves, and that’s basically it. The first thing you’ll notice is the weight of these things. They’re certainly quite hefty, though that’s likely because all the hardware is located in each bulb. The second thing you’ll notice, if you’re me anyways, is that oh geez one of these bulbs isn’t the same as the others? And that’s because this “review unit” was apparently a used return from Amazon, and whomever had the bulbs before me decided to put a different TP-Link bulb in there instead of a fourth Nooie bulb. Oops! Installation of the bulbs are, of course, simple: first you get a ladder, and then you find some monkeys. It’s as simple as screwing them into the appropriately sized E26 socket. Then, you install the Nooie app on your smartphone, available on both iOS and Android, sign up for an account and sync the light bulbs to your phone. If you happen to get a return like I did, you may have to reset the bulbs so you can sync them to your own device, but this is easily done by turning your lights on and off three times, which is pleasantly easy. Once you’re all synced, congratulations! You now have fancy RGB light bulbs! Neat!
Once everything’s all nice and synced, you can control each individual light’s color and brightness, or you can group them together if you have multiple bulbs in one location. One of the nicer features is that the Nooie app can link to Google Home or Amazon’s Alexa, so you can use voice commands to turn your lights on or off, or change the colors. You can set up schedules for the lights to automatically turn on or off at certain times, as well as set the lights to ramp up or ramp down during the morning/night, respectively. You can also choose one of the eight “themes” listed in the app, which gives you a few different light options: focused gives you a warm light tone that’s not too bright, natural blasts you with bright and warm light to simulate sunlight, romantic changes the lights to pink (y’know, the romantic color), and the most interesting one is called floating, which cycles between cooler-toned colors to give you the impression you’re on water. So far that’s all well and good, but, unfortunately, the pleasantness kind of stops there. The biggest issue I have with these bulbs is mostly related to the app; the features offered are really rather barebones when it comes to color customization. For example, long with those premade themes, you can create your own which is well and good...but you can only choose static colors, you can’t set your bulbs to cycle through colors at all, and you can only create a whopping two themes. Color accuracy is also a problem when choosing a color in the app, as colors produced by the bulbs tend to wind up being lighter in tone than the color chosen in the app. Curiously, if you decide to use voice commands via one of the assistants, you can get colors that actually look like you want them to. As you can see below, "red" appears more pink, "orange" is basically yellow, and "pink" is basically white. Colors like blue or green do tend to turn out pretty well, but they're still noticeably lighter in tone than they should be.
These aren’t massive problems though, and given their ease of use and their cheap prices compared to similar full RGB bulbs, it’s hard not to recommend the Nooie Aurora Smartbulbs. If you’re just looking for some easy to use and don’t mind missing out on some more advanced customization, definitely pick these up.
Verdict
- I like RGB
- Voice assistant support is neat
- Great price for lightbulbs
- My daughter now says "ok googoogool change lights green!" to try and change the lights and it's adorable
- Color accuracy is odd
- Can't set up advanced themes
