The IT Nerd

For the last few years, I’ve had two of these smart bulbs in my den. But over the last week one would just randomly factory reset itself. After the third time that happened, I figured enough is enough and I replaced both. After doing some research, I finally settled on the GE Cync Full Color Direct Connect Smart Bulb. What led me two this bulb were two things:

1. These were Matter compatible. Matter is a common standard for smart home devices. So if your smart home platform (Namely Apple HomeKit, Google Home, Amazon Alexa, or Samsung Smart Things for example) supports Matter, your latest smart home device should work. More on that later.
2. The price which was $19.99 CDN for each bulb at my local Best Buy which for whatever reason seemed to be the only place that had them in stock.

Here’s a look at the packaging that this bulb comes in:

What’s interesting about this is that Apple HomeKit isn’t mentioned. In fact, looking around the box the only mention of Apple that I could find is a sentence where it says that it supports “Apple Home” which isn’t a thing. I guess GE didn’t pay Apple to use the HomeKit logo or something. That’s something that may dissuade less tech savvy consumers from buying this bulb unless they really take the time to read the box, or they see the Matter logo and automatically know it will work with Apple HomeKit.

Anyway, here’s the bulb:

It’s unremarkable really. But on the back side of the bulb is a sticker with the Matter pairing code and the associated QR code. So that should mean that I should be able to do the following:

1. Screw the bulb into the light fixture’s socket.
2. Open up the Home app and click on the “+” sign at the top right and choose “Add Accessory”
3. Scan the Matter code
4. Sit back and wait for it to be added to my HomeKit setup
5. Repeat steps 1-4 for the second bulb as the second bulb as the light fixture had two bulbs.
6. Declare victory and have a beer.

That’s not how it went down. I got as far as step three and after a couple of minutes I got an error that the bulb could not be added to HomeKit. I figured that it was a fluke so I tried it again and got the same error. Perplexed I picked up the box and read the instructions as I have to admit that I YOLO’ed things as I had made the assumption that this would be simple to add. That’s when the light bulb went on metaphorically speaking. This is a Matter device that requires a 2.4 Ghz WiFi connection. My iPhone is normally on the 5Ghz bands because I have two separate WiFi bands on my WiFi network. That’s to keep the “slower” devices on 2.4Ghz and the “faster” devices on 5Ghz. I reasoned that because my phone was on the 5Ghz band, it couldn’t talk to the bulb to connect the bulb which was on the 2.4 Ghz band. To address that, I connected my iPhone up to the 2.4Ghz band. Then tried to add the bulbs again. It took two tries for each bulb for whatever reason after I factory reset them using these instructions, but I got it to work.

This in a way illustrates the fact that smart home gear should be easy to install, but sometimes isn’t. In my case my issues were due to how my network is set up, which to be clear isn’t weird as a lot of people run separate WiFi bands as opposed to having a single network that encompasses both bands. So you think this would have been accounted for. But clearly not. And for a less tech savvy user, this might have resulted in them returning these bulbs to Best Buy. The take home message is that Matter clearly has teething pains that need to be addressed in order to make the user experience better.

Anyway in testing these bulbs, I found the response times to be quick. Be it just simply turning them off or on, changing the colour, or increasing the brightness. Speaking of the brightness, these bulbs can get insanely bright. The box says 800 lumens and I believe it. I’ve set them to 70% of that by default. But I’ve created HomeKit scenes that can boost them to full brightness or dim them to 40% of 800 lumens. In terms of colour range, that too is insane as you get a number of methods to dial in the colour of the bulbs:

I have them set to a cool white which works for my wife and I.

All of this is available in the Home app on my iPhone. But I assume that it is similar on other home automation platforms. The other thing that the Home app is supposed to handle firmware updates for these bulbs. That is a good thing as firmware updates aren’t just for functionality and bug fixes. They’re for security as well. And a lot of users don’t update their firmware leaving them open to something bad potentially happening to them.

Now I should mention that these bulbs to have their own iOS and Android app. But if you use one of the major home automation platforms, there’s no reason for you to use that app. Conversely, if you do want to use the app because you’re not on one of the major home automation platforms, setting up these bulbs and controlling them is insanely easy based on tests using a third bulb that I purchased for experimentation purposes. I didn’t encounter any of the issues that I did encounter via Matter.

So would I recommend these bulbs? They do work. The price is great. But you might have issues with the setup which have more to do with Matter than with the bulbs one suspects. So if you by them knowing that you may have to put in some more work than you planned on to get these bulbs operational, you won’t be disappointed.