New Nanoleaf Essentials Matter Smart Holiday String Lights — with support for the new Matter standard and all smart-home plaforms, including HomeKit — are coming in time for winter holidays, the company said Thursday.
Or maybe even in time for Halloween, for that matter. At any rate, it’s almost time to get festive.
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Nanoleaf Essentials Matter Smart Holiday String Lights
Hopefully you’re feeling festive to the tune of $120, because that’s how much Nanonleaf’s new high-tech lights cost when you preorder now (normally $150). That’s actually less expensive than some, like Philips Hue’s Festavia string lights, which work with all smart-home platforms but aren’t yet Matter-enabled.
And you may get more use out of them than just jacking up the cost of your Christmas tree or Festivus pole, because they do both color and tunable white light. And they carry IP44 waterproofing, so you can use them outside.
Control them with any smart-home platform
Photo: Nanoleaf
The lights work with Apple Home (and Siri), Amazon Alexa, Google Home and Samsung SmartThings through the Matter smart-home technology standard.
They come in a pack of two 33-foot strings that can connect to span 65.6 feet. On the strings, 250 LEDs can display over 16 million colors. You can control the lights as a group or individually, incorporating color gradients and scenes.
The controller that connects the two strings even includes a microphone. It helps the lights sync to music. Using accessories, you can sync them to your TV, too, as It’s a Wonderful Life or A Charlie Brown Christmas plays.
Nanoleaf app
Photo: Nanoleaf
The Nanoleaf app gives you nine preset lighting scenes, including “crackling fireplace,” but you can download others or create your own.
While the rest of Nanoleaf’s Matter-enabled Essentials line works over Thread networking, the new holiday lights work over Wi-Fi, Matter over Wi-Fi and Bluetooth networking to take full advantage of their capabilities.
“We see Wi-Fi and Thread as complementary technologies in the smart home of the future,” Nanoleaf told The Verge.
“Wi-Fi has higher bandwidth than Thread, which is optimal for products with many addressable zones (like our Shapes and Lines, for example),” she continued. “We wanted to ensure the product could take full advantage of experiences built around immersive technologies like Sync Plus, which can connect all of your Nanoleaf RGB lighting together for screen mirroring.”
Nanoleaf said shipping starts in late October.
Price: $150 $120 (early-bird deal)
Where to preorder: Nanoleaf
