How to Set a Room’s Mood with Smart Lighting

  

A living room with purple LED lights.

Color can affect your mood. Businesses spend thousands of dollars each year researching which colors of decor will encourage customers to drop the most dough when they walk through the door. You can also use this mental trick to set the mood in a room with just the color of your lights.

Credits : howtogeek

Cold or Warm? Each Has Its Place

Smart lighting is available in different colors, which allows you to change the color of a room to suit your needs. For example, “colder” lighting makes someone feel more productive and focused and is best suited for an office. This is why so many office buildings use harsh fluorescent lighting.

On the flip side, “warmer” lighting—like candlelight or overhead lighting in restaurants—promotes a sense of relaxation.

You can tweak the color of the lighting in your home to change your mood, but first, you have to understand how color psychology works. After that, it’s a simple matter of changing the lights to suit your needs.

Color Psychology

Color psychology is an extensive and complex field, and the science of it isn’t conclusive. Still, if you want to try it, here are a few basics to keep in mind:

  • Red is associated with power: It can help stimulate your appetite, which makes it an ideal color for a kitchen or dining room. In terms of lighting, it provides a sense of urgency. In less intense shades, it can help with relaxation.
  • Blue is calming: Although it gets a bad rap for interrupting the circadian rhythm, soft blue light can be helpful in offices and workplaces as a productivity booster.
  • Purple helps stimulate creativity: If you’re an artist, writer, designer, or photographer, or just working through a difficult problem, soft purple lighting can help.
  • Green causes the least amount of eye strain: This would be ideal in a bedroom or living room to put you at ease as you relax and catch up on your favorite TV series.
  • Orange and yellow are associated with sunrise: Both are ideal for soft lighting in the morning as you get ready to encourage a sense of happiness and contentment.

Of course, there are color temperatures of light, as well. For example, a cool white has a bluish tint that encourages focus and alertness, but it can disturb your sleep cycle. A warm white is the perfect option for relaxing and winding down before bed, but not the best choice for an office environment.

How to Set a Room’s Mood with Smart Lighting

The Philips Hue and similar smart lights make it possible to change the color of the light within a room on the fly. Setting specific scenes allows you to recall the same settings at the tap of a button.

We’ll demonstrate how to do this with Philips Hue lighting, but you can use any smart lighting system that offers configurable colors.

To do this, you’ll need the Philips Hue app on your mobile device, a Hue Bridge, and at least one Hue light with color. Open the Philips Hue app. In our example, there are already three rooms set up, but yours will look different based on the layout of your home. Select one of the rooms.

The "Your Rooms" menu in the Philips Hue app.

After you choose a room, a color wheel appears.

The color wheel in the Philips Hue app.

You can move the pointer around the wheel to choose which color and shade you want. Alternatively, if you tap the painter’s palette icon in the upper-right corner, you can choose from a series of preset scenes. If you have more than one bulb in the room, each will reflect a different color as part of the scene.

The scene selection menu in the Philips Hue app.

You can also create your own scene. To do so, just tap “New Scene” in the upper-left corner. In the next screen, type a name for your scene and choose the colors you want to incorporate within it.

A custom scene in the Philips Hue app.

This tool is particularly powerful; you can even choose an image and have your scene incorporate its ambient colors. There are several preset images, but you can also choose one from your camera roll.

In addition to the basic functions offered by Philips Hue lights, there are also some experimental features available through Hue Labs. This platform allows Philips Hue owners to opt into early prototype features, like enabling a light to flicker like a candle.

If you want to see the available options, just tap “Explore” at the bottom of the screen, and then tap “Hue Labs.”

Tap "Hue Labs."

Philips Hue provides a powerful customization platform in which people can set the mood in their homes with smart lighting, but it isn’t the only one. People with LIFX lighting can access many similar functions, as well as those with Sengled, Tradfri, or GE lighting.

The Best Smartwatches for 2021

Think it's time to upgrade your traditional watch by adding some apps and notifications to your wrist? Here are the features to look for, along with the top-rated smartwatches we've tested.

Credits : pcmag.com

Bringing Brains to Your Wrist

The infamous calculator watch has been around since the 1970s, but smartwatches have finally reached the point that they're, well, smart. From running apps, to displaying smartphone notifications, to monitoring your heart rate, the latest crop of smartwatches do a lot more than just tell time. But which one should you buy? We've rounded up our top-rated options to help you decide. It's also important to know what to look for, so keep the following advice in mind when shopping around.

Pick a Watch That Works With Your Phone

Naturally, the first thing you'll want to consider when buying a smartwatch is compatibility. Most of the devices currently available use Wear OS, Google's operating system for wearables. Wear OS supports iOS, but make sure to find out if the features you want are available on iOS before buying in. Fitbit OS and Samsung's Tizen also support both Android and iOS. The Apple Watch, as you'd expect, connects strictly to iOS-powered devices, so it's iPhone-only. Make sure to pick a watch that's compatible with the mobile device you own.

Galaxy Watch3

Samsung Galaxy Watch3

What About Apps?

What separates a smartwatch from a dumb watch? Lots of things, but as smartphones have taught us, apps might be the most important.

Most of the watches we like feature full-fledged app stores, bringing everything from Uber and Yelp to—yes, a calculator—to your wrist. Much like smartphones, app availability is a good way to determine which product to get, so make sure to check out the app selection for each watch before buying in.

And if you're looking for apps, right now Apple is your best bet. The Apple Watch has the largest number of high-quality apps and big-name developers, by far. Wear OS also has its fair share, and Fitbit OS is catching up, but developer interest definitely seems to be in Apple first. Samsung's Tizen still doesn't seem to be on the radar for most major developers.

Apple Watch Series 6 and SE

Apple Watch Series 6 and SE

Fitness Tracker vs. Smartwatch

Unless you want a gadget on both of your wrists (not the best look, in my opinion), you'll want a smartwatch that can do double duty as a fitness tracker—or any other wearable gadget you were thinking about getting. Most smartwatches are capable of tracking basic activity, like steps, but you need to pay close attention to any additional features.

The Apple Watch Series 6, for instance, features GPS so it can track your runs without the help of a companion device. It also has a heart rate sensor. Not only that, but an ECG function allows you to generate a PDF of your heart rhythm you can share with your doctor, and an SpO2 sensor that measures your blood oxygen saturation level on demand. The Samsung Galaxy Watch3 also offers ECG and SpO2 apps. Of course, they're the two most expensive products on this list. The Fitbit Versa 3 costs less and tracks plenty of fitness and sleep metrics, but has less in the way of third-party apps, so there's some trade-off.

Look closely and choose a watch that tracks the activities and health metrics you want to monitor.

Fitbit Versa 3

Fitbit Versa 3

Cellular Connectivity

A cellular connection allows you to make calls, send texts, stream music, download apps, and do anything else that requires an internet connection, without actually needing to be connected to your phone. The cellular Apple Watch Series 6 carries a $100 premium over the standard version, and you also have to pay to add it to your phone plan—most carriers charge an additional $10 per month.

Whether this convenience is worth it for you depends on what you plan to use your watch for. If you want to be able to stream music while you exercise, but you want to leave your phone back in the locker room or at home, a cellular connection can certainly come in handy. If you always have your phone on you, however, you can probably save the money and skip it.

Battery Life

You don't want a smartwatch with good battery life, right? Good, because you're not going to get it. Watches with full-color, smartphone-like displays, like the Apple Watch and Wear OS watches, only last for about a day on a single charge. Features like always-on displays and GPS tracking are handy, but they drain battery life quickly.

The Series 6 only gets around 18 hours of battery life, so you’ll need to find some time to charge it during the day if you plan to use the sleep tracking feature. That could mean sacrificing some activity tracking during the day.

In general, you'll get the best battery life with one of the Fitbit watches. They typically last around four days before needing a charge. That means you can wear them to bed to track your sleep, something you can't do with a watch that needs to be charged every night.

Price

Smartwatches can be very expensive, but that doesn't mean you need to spend a lot of money to get a good one. Yes, the Apple Watch Hermès is sure to draw a lot of attention, but at $1,249 (and up), you can buy six Fitbit Versas. If you're a first-time smartwatch buyer, you might want to think about going the less-expensive route, in case you wind up not wearing it all that much.

Apple Watch SE

Apple Watch SE

The Best Android Watch

Now that Google has changed the name of Android Wear to Wear OS, and Wear OS supports both Android and iOS, Android watches are no longer really a thing. There are more Wear OS watches on the market than any other kind.

There are also far more styles to choose from. If you buy an Apple Watch, you're limited to a selection of proprietary bands if you want to swap out the original for a customized look (although Apple offers plenty). Many Wear OS watches support standard watch straps, making your options virtually limitless. Not only that, but the selection of watches themselves is far more diverse than the one-design-fits-all Apple Watch.

So while Wear OS still lags behind the Apple Watch in terms of simplicity and app selection, it's far more flexible when it comes to pricing and features. But pay close attention to the reviews, because not all Wear OS watches are created equal.

Buy It for Looks, Don't Buy It for Life

Let's not forget: You're also going to wear this thing. And unlike your Timex, it's probably not going to remain in style for years. Smartwatch design is rapidly changing, so hold out until you find something you actually want to wear. And keep in mind that smartwatches are still gadgets. The coming year is sure to bring new iterations of pretty much every watch on this list, not to mention plenty of completely new ones.

The battle for wrist real estate is quickly heating up. That's good news for consumers, since it's likely to result in even better—and better-looking—devices. I wouldn't be surprised if this list reads completely differently the next time you see it. But if you're looking for the best smartwatch available today, the options here are the finest we've seen so far. For the latest reviews, see our Smartwatch Product Guide.


Top smart watches (Ordered by Ratings) : 

  1. Apple Watch Series 5
  2. Fitbit Versa 2
  3. Apple Watch Series 6 (GPS, 40mm)
  4. Apple Watch Series 3
  5. Fitbit Versa 3
  6. Fitbit Ionic Fitness Tracker
  7. Fitbit Versa Lite
  8. Apple Watch SE (2020)
  9. Fossil Sport
  10. Samsung Galaxy Watch Active