Summary
When friends and family gather for the holidays, it’s the perfect time to impress them with thelatest smart lighting. Gamers tend to gravitate toward wall panels and LED light strips that look spectacular but aren’t suitable for hanging on trees. Fortunately, popular manufacturers like Nanoleaf offer products that are perfect for festive occasions. The Nanoleaf Smart Holiday String Lights bring the company’s usual color accuracy and an array of dynamic scenes to both indoor and outdoor settings.
The Smart Holiday String Lights feature 250 LED bulbs on two 10-meter sections that can turn any space into a winter wonderland. Unlike most competitors, Nanoleaf’s lights are also Matter-compatible, making them future-proof as this smart home protocol gains traction. It’s also exciting to see how well the traditional Nanoleaf scenes and features translate to decks and patios. Game Rant was kindly sent a review sample of the Holiday String Lights just in time to let readers know if they are worthy of a last-minute purchase.
Nanoleaf Matter Smart Holiday String Lights
Nanoleaf Matter Smart Holiday String Lights are an affordable way to modernize traditional LED string lights. Easily wrapped around trees or railings, these festive lights feature 250 LED bulbs spread out over two connected 10-meter sections. Buyers can enjoy a generous selection of holiday-inspired patterns in the Nanoleaf app and have the Smart Holiday String Lights react to music. Matter compatible, it’s possible to add the lights to multiple smart home apps and access features like voice control and scheduling.
Contents of Package
Despite their 20-meter length and attached controller, the Nanoleaf Smart Holiday String Lights ship to buyers in a reasonably compact box. Nanoleaf makes no mistake in indicating these lights are holiday-oriented while retaining their usual branding.
Inside the packaging are the string lights separated into two 10-meter sections, a controller box, a power adapter, and a quick start guide.
Installation
When it comes to installing the Smart Holiday String Lights in and around a home, the options are numerous. String lights often hang from Christmas trees, but their versatile nature can find them in many other places. Unlike most otherNanoleaf smart lights, the Holiday String Lights are IP44-rated to withstand cold weather, rain, and snow. To put their perseverance to the test, in this instance, the lights were used to decorate a deck railing in winter conditions.
When running them along a tree, installers will have to think about how to orient the two 10-meter sections of the lights. The situation is more straightforward with a long railing, but outdoor installations often introduce the need for weather-resistant extension cords.
20 meters or roughly 65 feet seems like a lot, but depending on how tightly the LED bulbs are wrapped, some buyers may run out of lights more quickly than anticipated. There is a decent amount of space between bulbs, so bunching up the lights is preferable for maximum illumination. Even so, the Smart Holiday String Lights were sufficiently lengthy to run one from one end of the deck to the other.
After giving the lights a home, it’s simply a matter of connecting them to the power adapter and outlet.
Software
Following the same process as similarNanoleaf Essentials Matter light strips and bulbs, it’s easiest to pair the Holiday String Lights with the Nanoleaf app first. These lights include Wi-Fi and Bluetooth connectivity, but to access all of their smart features, users will need Google Home, Alexa, or HomeKit.
Installing smart lights outdoors raises the possibility of a weak Wi-Fi signal dampening holiday spirits. This is where a 2.4 Ghz wireless network can have advantages since it generally has a more extended range than higher bands. Fortunately, while the smartphone used to set up the Holiday String Lights had some connectivity issues while on a 5 GHz band, the lights never failed to respond to commands.
The Nanoleaf app found the Holiday Smart Lights almost immediately, and then a prompt appeared to connect them to Matter. It was also simple to make the lights show up in Google Home, which was a relief since some past Matter devices required a process of pairing and unpairing.
Matter-compatible devices are becoming more commonplace, but some buyers might still have some confusion about the technology. These string lights need a Matter-compatible hub to communicate with various devices instantly, but many buyers will have a supportedsmart home gadget. The other reality is that multiple apps are needed to maximize the potential of the Holiday Smart Lights. In the Nanoleaf app, users will find many preset holiday scenes, but features like scheduling can only happen in other smart home apps like Google Home. This might disappoint some users since scheduling is crucial for holiday lighting. At the same time, buyers won’t find the same selection of dynamic scenes outside of Nanoleaf’s software.
Experimenting with different scenes in the Nanoleaf app is a ton of fun. Searching the Discover tab reveals a treasure trove of additional patterns appropriate for the festive season. It’s also possible to edit scenes on the fly to change colors and animation speeds.
Performance
Of course, whether it’s worth upgrading to smart string lights largely depends on how impressive they look. Fortunately, the Nanoleaf Holiday Smart Lights are bright enough to illuminate the darkest front or back yards. The suggested scenes offer more complex animations than are typically seen with cheaper LED lights.
When stretched out on a long railing, the transitions between all the 250 LED bulbs become even more impressive.
If seeing so many different colors at once becomes distracting, these Nanoleaf lights also excel at displaying warm or cool white hues.
As far as the default scenes in the Nanoleaf app, a few standouts include Holiday Magic, which confirms the wide color palette of the LED bulbs, and Reindeer Games, which is quite stunning with its purplish and blue illumination. Several other options especially shine when reacting to music. However, the response to evenhigh-quality speakersmay disappoint if the controller box and its internal mic are hidden on the floor.
Visitors without access to a smart home network aren’t left out, since a smartphone isn’t mandatory to control the Holiday Smart Lights. The black controller can toggle through many default scenes and solid colors and power the lights on and off.
Reliability is always a concern with festive lights since the holidays can end before a user can correct any issues. After setting up a schedule in Google Home for the string lights, they faithfully turned on and off for six hours nightly. The lights never randomly changed scenes or powered off, but if paired with other lights in a home, voice commands that control other smart devices might also affect the LED bulbs outdoors.
Usually staples ingaming rooms, some buyers may hesitate to use premium Nanoleaf LED lights in the great outdoors. Although the control box and wiring don’t look much more rugged than what’s included withNanoleaf Shapes, it survived several below-freezing nights and some milder rainy weather. Still, the true test of holiday string lights will come the following year after they have been neglected and stored away.
If a Christmas tree is the target, the black cord used in the Holiday Smart Lights is not ideal to hide wiring. Another difference between Nanoleaf’s lights and most traditional string lights is that multiple units can’t be connected. This multiplies the power adapters needed for a large display, but they can at least be synced wirelessly in the smart lighting age.
Conclusion
Nanoleaf’s Smart Holiday Lights fill a void in the manufacturer’s lineup with some impressive-looking indoor/outdoor LED string lights. Installation is mostly frustration-free, provided the lights don’t instantly become tangled. Pairing the string lights in the Nanoleaf app is straightforward, but features like scheduling require additional configuration in other smart home apps. The Matter compatibility of the Smart Holiday Lights will have more benefits in the future, but otherwise, buyers can still enjoy the lights using the Nanoleaf app or control box.
Followers ofNanoleaf panelsexpect bright illumination with accurate colors and seamless animations. The Smart Holiday Lights succeeds in all these areas, with some dynamic scenes that outshine traditional string lights. Having Nanoleaf lights that can function outdoors opens up new possibilities to bring innovative smart lighting features beyond the walls of gaming rooms.
The suggested scenes for these string lights in the Nanoleaf app effectively showcase what the lights are capable of. Nanoleaf’s extensive user base shares many additional patterns that respond to music or offer countless variations of traditional holiday colors. Families and friends can also get creative and devise new lighting schemes with basic editing features in the app.
Cost is always a concern when transitioning from traditional lights to smart lights. Nanoleaf is not exactly known as a budget brand, but like with theNanoleaf 4Dscreen lighting kit, the Smart Holiday Lights are priced lower than other premium string lights. Matter compatibility also ensures that these festive lights will be in an evolving smart home for years to come.
$220
$70
Twinkly Strings App Controlled LED Christmas Lights
$130
The Nanoleaf Smart Holiday String Lights compete for precious holiday dollars with other high-end smart lights. Not surprisingly, Philips Hue has the priciest lights of the bunch in theirFestavia String Lights. Like with Nanoleaf’s lights, buyers receive 250 LED bulbs on 65 feet of wiring. The color accuracy of the Festavia lights is second to none, but they output more subtle mood lighting rather than blinding illumination. However, compatibility with smart home platforms, including HomeKit, is excellent, which is not the case with some less expensive alternatives.
Govee has infiltrated the smart lighting world at every corner, including the holiday lighting sector. TheGovee Outdoor String Lightscontain 48 or 96 feet of round LED light bulbs rather than the tiny bulbs on other string lights. As with otherGovee smart lights, the Outdoor String Lights benefit from RGBIC technology, enabling each bulb to display multiple colors simultaneously. While there are endless Govee bulbs, light strips, and panels to sync with, the Outdoor String Lights won’t play nicely with HomeKit smart devices.
Twinkly Stringshas been a popular choice among holiday decorators for several years. This manufacturer focuses on the festive season, even selling some prelit Christmas trees. The Twinkly Strings are sold in lengths up to 105 feet, allowing easy color remapping using a mobile phone’s camera. White hues have disappointed some audiences with a lack of variety, but these are as bright and colorful as any competing string light.
FAQ
Q: How do you connect smart string lights?
Smart string lights require a bit more setup than just plugging them into a power outlet. Depending on the brand of the lights, buyers will usually need to install the appropriate app and then pair them with phones using Wi-Fi or Bluetooth. It’s then possible to program the lights with a variety of scenes and schedule them to turn on and off.
Q: Why do gamers like RGB lights so much?
RGB lighting allows gamers to create a more unique gaming rig since their effects are usually highly customizable. Also, RGB lights can make a gaming experience more immersive by mirroring gaming content and reacting to in-game events.
Q: Should I upgrade to a Thread network with Matter devices now?
The problem with emerging Thread networks is that most existing devices are not upgradable to support this protocol. Unless you are decorating a home or room from scratch with newly purchased smart lights, it may be wise to wait to see how this technology changes the marketplace.
