Philips Hue’s Festavia string lights are sparkly, colorful, and expensive

It’s time for you to decorate your home for winter holidays, with pumpkins being put out to pasture now and turkeys beginning to gobble. You can make any holiday special with some decorations, whether it’s Hanukkah or Kwanzaa or Solstice. smart lightingAnd Philips Hue’s new Festavia string lightsLook like a great option for adding a little more wow.

This $159.99 smart light string features 250 mini-color-changing smart LEDs that span a 66-foot (20-meter) length. These indoor lights can be used to decorate your home with holiday cheer, such as by strung up your staircase or wrapping around your Christmas tree. They’re available to order now at philips-hue.com.

In my house, we tend to get a 6-foot tree, and the general recommendation is 100 lights per foot, which means we’d ideally need three of these strings to decorate. This is quite a large financial investment. It’s a huge financial savings. bitYou will find more meaning.

Festavia strips can do more than standard holiday lights. Using the Hue app, you can set the Zigbee/Bluetooth powered lights to turn on and off on a schedule, based on sunrise or sunset, using a motion sensor, or with one of Hue’s remote controls. This is much more convenient than trying to climb under the tree.

The majority of these tasks can be accomplished with a standard set holiday lights, plugged into an electrical outlet. But the Hue app lets you adjust the color and brightness of your Festavia strip. And, as these are gradient lights — which means groups of the LEDs are addressable — you can have multiple colors going at once.

If you have other Hue lighting and a Hue bridge, you can link them with the Festavia to extend the holiday atmosphere across the room or house and sync them with music using Hue’s Spotify and Samsung SmartThings integration.

Hue has also added two new effects to its app to take advantage of this new lighting form factor (this is the company’s first string lighting product).

Sparkle makes every light on the string twinkle and a new Scattered style scatters up to five colors randomly along each string. You can also use any of Hue’s existing effects — like Candle or Fireplace for a cozy look.

There aren’t a lot of smart string lights designed for live Christmas trees. Twinkly is the most well-known, with slightly lower prices.$135 for 250 lamps / 66 feetThey are also available in a variety of lengths (26 to 79.5 feet). They can also be used outdoors because they are weatherproof.

Both brands can be used with Amazon Alexa or Google Home. Hue is also compatible with Samsung SmartThings. Of course, it’s a lot cheaper to use a smart plug for scheduling and remote control with an app or voice assistant. These fancy smart lighting options are only worth looking at if you need the additional feature of addressable and color-changing lighting.