Jiří Filip Smart home accessories have enjoyed enormous popularity in recent years. However, have you ever thought about what exactly can be described as a kind of ticket to this smart home world? In my opinion, it is a smart light bulb, which many lovers of modern technology who are hungry for a smart home will buy, like the first piece in their puzzle. There are many light bulbs on the market, and finding your way around them can sometimes be quite a problem. In the following lines, we will therefore try to help you with your orientation at least partially. The Vocolinc L3 smart light bulb arrived in the editorial office for testing, which we tested intensively, and in the following lines we will introduce you to it and evaluate it.
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Pavel Jelic Technical Specifications
Before we start testing the bulb itself, I will briefly introduce you to its technical specifications. It is an energy-saving bulb (energy efficiency class A+) with a standard E27 socket, power consumption 9,5W (which is equal to classic 60W bulbs), luminous flux 850 lm and a lifetime of 25 hours. The light bulb has a WiFi module in it, representing the role of the classic Bridge known from other HomeKit products, through which it can communicate with your phone, tablet and other devices you want to control via the home 000 GHz WiFi. In terms of type, it is an LED bulb that you can light up with 2,4 million colors in both cool and warm shades. Of course, you can also play with dimming with it, in the range of 16 to 1%, which in other words means that you can dim the lighting of the bulb to a really minimal level, at which it does not illuminate almost anything. In addition, special LED chips for white will please, thanks to which this color is displayed by the bulb really perfectly.
Like all other products, the bulb supports HomeKit and can therefore be controlled by voice via Siri. However, it can also be controlled by Amazon's Alexa or Google's Assistant. In addition to voice assistants, it is of course possible to control the light bulb via the special Vocolinc application, which is very similar to Home on iOS and you can combine all your Vocolinc products into it. So it's really up to you which controls you prefer.
As for the shape of the bulb, as you can see for yourself in the photos, it is an absolute classic in the shape of a drop, which is probably the most used bulb shape. So you definitely don't have to worry about it looking extravagant in your chandelier. It looks completely standard, and you will only know that it is smart when you take your phone out of your pocket and start controlling it from it.
Testing
In order to be able to control the bulb with your phone, it must first be paired. You can do this either through the Home application or through the Vocolinc app, which is free to download in the App Store, and I would definitely recommend downloading it. If you are a beginner in HomeKit, it might paradoxically be easier for you than the native solution from Apple. In addition, it is only through it that it is possible to use some functions for which you would need to set up the HomeKit headquarters from Apple TV, HomePod or iPad in the case of using the Home. However, since I will be evaluating the light bulb more from a beginner's point of view, we will focus on controllability mainly via the Vocolinc app. But let's go back to pairing the light bulb with the phone for a moment. This is done via a QR code that you just need to scan with your phone's camera and you're done. After that, thanks to the connection of the bulb with your device via WiFi, you can enjoy its smart functions.
Testing a light bulb is complicated in its own way, because we all kind of know what to expect from it and therefore there is not much to surprise. Therefore, in such a case, one will focus much more on the functionality as such and any problems that could arise in extreme cases. However, I did not come across anything like that during the tests. As soon as you turn on the light bulb in the app, it lights up instantly, as soon as you turn it off, it turns off immediately. If you decide to change its colors, everything takes place de facto in real time according to how you are currently moving your finger over the color palette and the same applies to dimming. The colors displayed on the phone's display always corresponded to those "displayed" by the light bulb 1:1, but in the evening, for example, it is necessary to take into account that Night Shift can be activated on the phone, which slightly changes the colors of the display and therefore, with this active technology, the color of the light bulb may not match those on the display to answer 100%. However, this is of course much more a "problem" of the phone than the light bulb itself, and its solution is as a result absolutely simple - turn off Night Shift for a while.
Via the Vocolinc app, you can set a number of different lighting modes that can conjure up an idyll in your home, a bar atmosphere with slowly changing lights or even a disco illuminated by uncontrollable flashing of all kinds of colors. At the same time, everything can be adjusted in various ways and thus adapted completely to your image. It is also worth noting the possibility to mark the names of individual rooms in the light bulb app (or to include them in them), which will help you navigate them very well if you use Vocolinc light bulbs in large quantities. It is not even a problem to set up scenes where, for example, after coming home from work in the evening, with a single tap on the display in the relevant app, you turn on the light in exactly the intensity and color that is most pleasant to you at that moment. A whole range of scenes can be set, even in combination with other products. There are certainly no limits to imagination in this direction. I must not forget the timing option, where you simply set the switch-off time in the application and thus the switch-on time, and you don't have to worry about anything else. This thing especially worked for me as an alarm clock in situations where I really needed to get up and was worried that the mere sound of the alarm wouldn't get me out of bed. However, turning on the light in your bedroom will get you out of bed really easily. So, as you can see for yourself, the app really has a lot to offer, with all the features being useful and extremely reliable. Not once during my testing did anything fail or even completely fall.
Summary
As I already wrote in the introduction, I think that a smart bulb in general is the ticket to the world of smart home accessories, and if you want to make your home special with these gadgets, you should start with this product. And the Vocolinc L3 is, in my opinion, one of the best tickets you can get for this decision. This is a really very reliable light bulb that you can control both via HomeKit and the app, it is also economical and after several days of testing I can say with a calm heart that it is also of high quality. It certainly does not suffer from any ailments that would make you uncomfortable in any way when using it. So you definitely won't burn yourself by buying it.
discount code
If you are interested in the bulb, you can buy it at the Vocolinc e-shop at a very interesting price. The regular price of the bulb is 899 crowns, but thanks to the discount code JAB10 you can buy it 10% cheaper, just like any other product from the Vocolincu offer. The discount code applies to the entire assortment.
Sorry, a lot of chatter and no real comparison with competing products. Thanks to all the crap around it, it's too long and hard to read - maybe no one will read the whole thing. It would like to summarize and compare it with other similar products, otherwise it is not worth much. We practically only found out that it works, and that right away on thousands of lines. So we practically know nothing. It's kind of expected that it will work. We did not learn more and we are where we were at the beginning.