 So the holidays are here and that means it's time for the usual trappings of the Christmas season excess spending, excess amounts of eggnog and excess decorative lighting. Now for many people this might just mean grabbing some lights from that box in the attic throwing them into an outlet and draping them over something, but that isn't exactly very fun or interesting and maybe that's why we've seen so many smart Christmas lights hit the market in the last couple of years. But are the options out there good enough to turn your average tech head's house into a veritable Santa's workshop that you can control in the palm of your hand? Well, it's time to find out. After we thank Rosewill for sponsoring this video. Check out their neon k85 gaming keyboard with mechanical switches and M53 gaming mouse with up to 4,000 DPI at the links below. So we're going to be looking at a few different options for your high-tech holiday setup with varying feature sets but all four of them seem to have one simple idea as an integral part of their design philosophies. Having to continually unplug and replug your lights every night is a massive pain. Especially after going to all the trouble of setting them up in the first place. Especially if your decorating style reminds the neighbors of Clark Griswold. So just how convenient then did our contenders make our experience? First up, let's have a look at the Twinkly system from Italian Concern LED Works. And even though the sales rep might give you a confused look if you walk into the store and ask for Twinkly lights, it did actually come to us in a very handsome looking, not to mention well labeled box. Twinkly, more than any of the other products in this video, seems designed specifically with Christmas trees in mind. Which is cool because the app will connect to your phone's camera and will actually map where each individual LED bulb is on the tree after you set them up. You'll be able to see this map on your screen so that you can address each light individually for granular control allowing you to draw custom effects onto the tree. Unfortunately, the apps a little finicky, it couldn't find the light set way too often and the system was a bit slow to respond at times. So the ability to create these custom effects is cool, but it's not very intuitive and the setup was kind of a pain as it didn't specify that you need to be on the 2.4 GHz band when connecting it to your home network. You could use it on the 5 GHz band, but only after it was up and running. With all that said, the lights themselves look great, they're plenty bright and the effects really helped bring John's, we're actually at John's house right now, John's tree to life. They are a bit pricey at $110 for a 105 light starter set and that gets even worse because I would definitely consider getting an extension if you really want full coverage of your tree. This one actually needed a second set of plain old regular lights to complete the look and at that price point I would expect better app implementation, but overall this one's not a bad buy at all. On the subject of underwhelming app support, let's take a look at the Lumen Play from S4 lights next. Unlike Twinkly, this one connects via Bluetooth 4.0, so you'll need to make sure your phone is compatible and even then the app might still cause problems. So it was totally non-responsive on a Nexus 6P running Android 8.0 Oreo, although we did get it working on devices using Android 7 or iOS 11. With all that said, any app that hasn't been updated in a while isn't a good sign. Physically though, the lights themselves felt heavy-duty and well-made and I wouldn't worry about putting them outside in the elements, but the flip side is this did make them a little bit unwieldy and cumbersome for indoor use, especially with the three bulky modules that we needed for just the 36 lights that you see in the kitchen here, which I imagine would make them pretty annoying to try to put on a tree. The effects that you can select look alright though, you can create your own... maybe? Because when we tried, certain patterns of animations ended up throwing random colors into our setup. So while the lights themselves aren't bad, the very buggy app experience earns the Lumen Play a pass from us at $160 for 36 lights. Though the set your lights to music feature actually did work nearly flawlessly, as long as you're playing something from your phone's local storage that isn't DRM protected. So that's good if you want to stare at something other than a Yule log while you listen to Christmas carols. Speaking of Yule logs, there's one product family with so many lighting options, I'm surprised they haven't released a smart Yule log. Philips Hue, which you've probably seen on display at your local big box store. The cool thing about this is that they can all be controlled by this little Wi-Fi puck thing called the bridge, which can connect to up to 50 different lights. So you'll probably only need one. We have a pair of Hue light strips, which we tried running behind some PCs and behind this couch for a bit of Christmas themed bias lighting, as well as two of the area effect Hue goes, no relation to the French novelist. Philips Hue was easily the most polished experience with a slick intuitive app interface with very low latency, and that responsiveness is exactly what you want when you're dealing with an elaborate lighting setup. Also, remote access over the internet was easy to set up and work like a charm. The Go lights aren't super bright, but they're powerful enough to light up a corner and they have cool features, like three hours of battery life if you want to move them around or position them somewhere temporarily during a Christmas party and the ability to tilt them up on this little integrated stand to aim them at your wall. Philips does offer another area effect light called the bloom, which is slightly more powerful, but we couldn't get our hands on that one for this video. The light strips on the other hand get extremely bright if you just set them to emit white light and are actually, like I'd say they're bright enough to really change how your workspace feels. Unfortunately, you can only set them to one color through the native app, even if you have two strips joined together like we did. Like the other options, Hue is extremely customizable within the app, but this is cool. It also features a large number of third-party apps with preloaded color profiles including Christmas themed one. This setup is a bit pricey, including 60 bucks just for the control bridge, but having a very pro-feeling experience that works almost without a hitch makes it at least somewhat easier to justify. But maybe even if you could afford it, it's possible that you already have like 10,000 bulbs worth of existing dumb Christmas lights and just don't see the point of tossing them all in the garbage. Well, if that sounds like you, you might be interested in something like the Wemo from Belkin, which isn't really a lighting product at all. Instead, Wemo makes smart outlets that plug into your existing ones. Now, although they won't suddenly make the El Cheapo lights that you got at the dollar store customizable and super fancy, they will at least enable control from your phone and a light-schedule randomizer in case you're leaving for the holidays and you want to deter any grinches that are roaming around. We weren't huge fans of how bulky the plugs are, but that was really the only complaint. Setup wasn't hard, although again, you'll need to use the 2.4 GHz band initially, and then you can control it over 5 GHz later, and remote access over the internet is enabled by default and worked just fine. The app interface is no-nonsense, and the plug itself actually gives off an extremely satisfying audible click when you turn your lights on and... well, that's on but not off. Off. So you don't have to wonder whether it worked. The fancier Insight Switch will also give you a one-touch report on power consumption, and if you enter how much your power company charges you, it'll even tell you exactly how much you're spending on keeping your house looking like one of those shopping mall Santa displays. The good news is that while you don't get any actual lights, they are a cheaper option compared to the other ones we've looked at at 80 bucks for two switches, if you already own lights. Now to be clear, none of the products we've looked at here are really geared towards those folks who want to do like crazy custom lighting setups that require a PC or a Raspberry Pi to drive them, not to mention more extensive programming. But with that said, Hue does have a public API if you are into that sort of thing. However, from what we've seen, for the mainstreamers out there, there are plenty of options that, while not perfect, could add a little bit of fun, techy, Christmas joy to your holiday setup, if you choose the right one. Especially if your aunt's dancing Santa Claus just isn't cutting it this year. Speaking of not cutting it, is your computer case not cutting it? Be Quiet just released their versatile Dark Base 700 MIDI tower, and to celebrate, they're having a contest. It's called the Dark Base 700 Character Builder. You have to build and configure a PC through their site, we'll have that linked below, for a chance to win that system, or one of eight Dark Base 700 cases. The contest runs from now until November 29th, and the winners will be announced by Be Quiet on December 1st. So check it out at the link in the video description. So thanks for watching guys, if you disliked this video you can hit that button, but if you liked it, hit like, get subscribed, maybe consider checking out where to buy some of the Christmassy stuff that we featured in the video description. Also linked down there we've got our merch store, which, oh I don't think we carry this horrible sweater anymore, but the t-shirt I'm wearing under it, we've got that in our merch store, and we've also got a link to our community forum.