Wyze Bulb (WLPA19)

As with the Wyze Cam and Sense kit, I have been very impressed by the Wyze bulbs. They perform just like pricier alternatives, and do so without the complexity and additional expense of a hub or bridge, as they connect to your smartphone over Wi-Fi.

The setup process is designed to be quick and simple, but I found it to be a little hit-and-miss. While one bulb worked right way, connecting to my Wi-Fi as intended, another bulb failed to connect a couple of times. This was remedied by force-closing the Wyze app and restarting my iPhone.

The main points to remember here are that the Wyze bulbs are white and not color. This means their brightness and temperature can be adjusted — from a cool, bright blue, through regular white, to a warm orange — but they cannot display any other colors. A useful feature of the Wyze app is called Vacation Mode, which switches your bulbs on and off at random to make it look like someone is at home. The company's smart bulbs can be controlled by speaking to your Alexa or Google Assistant smart speaker and also IFTTT.

It is important to note that these are Wi-Fi bulbs. This means they connect directly to your smartphone instead of to their own proprietary hub or bridge using a Zigbee or Z-Wave connection. The bulbs can only connect to 2.4GHz Wi-Fi networks, so if your network runs at 5GHz then the bulbs won't work.

For now, the white smart bulbs have all the functionality (and colors) most users will need, as they offer everything from warm orange through to crisp blue, and at almost any brightness.

Physically, the Wyze smart bulbs look much like any other, but are somewhat heavier.

Wyze is reachable by phone support Monday through Saturday.

At this price, the bulbs not only undercut rivals like Philips Hue, Lifx and even Ikea Tradfri, but they do so while offering broadly the same set of features. Wyze offers much of the same functionality for far less money; at $8 per bulb or four for $30, these really do offer excellent value.

Standard one-year warranty.