For a subtler (and perhaps more practical) color effect, go ahead and dial it up towards 100 percent. For the types of bold, vivid colors you'd want from a party light, you'll want to stay at 50 percent. This definitely makes for brighter light, but it also decreases the saturation of the shade. As said earlier, in color mode, anything above 50 percent brightness will start adding white light to the color you've selected. In the center of the Lifx color wheel, you'll find a dial that dims the light up and down. Again, rotating a wheel is a lot easier than navigating an ocean of pixels with your fingertip blocking the view. This is similar to the dedicated white-light spectrum that Philips offers directly above its full color spectrum. Lifx offers a separate color wheel for white light tones, which range from orangey, warm white shades to hot, bluish-white variations on daylight. The Lifx color wheel is a patently better way of selecting shades than the ocean of pixels Philips offers. It's a subtle difference, but one that makes for a patently better user experience with the product's core function: changing colors. In other apps, where you drag the selector around, your finger inevitably ends up covering the part of the spectrum that you're trying to see, and that makes hitting a precise shade a tedious trial-and-error process.

Tap a color, and it'll automatically rotate to the top. Instead of moving a tiny selector around a wide spectrum of colors (the approach that Philips and Tabu take), you'll simply rotate the spectrum itself. The interface for selecting specific colors is especially well-designed. Quirks aside, the app gets a lot of things right.

Still, I've never encountered anything that couldn't be solved with a little bit of fiddling, or by restarting the app. After spending more time with the bulbs, I've encountered the occasional quirk and hiccup - moreso than I've seen with Philips Hue. Once your bulbs are synced up with your home network, you'll be able to control them from your phone or tablet. Setting up new Lifx bulbs is an easy process that takes about a minute.

Download lifx a19