If you’ve been looking to upgrade your smart home, it looks like Philips will have you covered with a brand new Philips Hue Bridge Pro that boasts some impressive (in cases almost needlessly so) capabilities.
Signify, the company behind the Philips Hue brand, accidentally leaked the existence of the new Bridge a few days ago alongside spoilers for new lights and a wired video doorbell, but yet another leak – this time via Lowe’s – has clued us into what upgrades the Bridge Pro boasts beyond general promises of it being faster and able to support more devices.
Lowe’s runs a program called Loop, which gives customers free samples of new and pre-release tech, and it looks like one such item is the Philips Hue Hue Bridge Pro. Several people have shared images and asked questions about the product on social media – with one tester being completely unsure what to do with the new Bridge Pro as they have no Philips Hue smart lights. 9to5Google reports that some people have even taken to Facebook Marketplace to sell their Bridge Pros.
These shenanigans have given us some key details. Firstly, the Bridge Pro can supposedly support 150+ lights – a huge increase from the current limit of 50. That might seem like overkill for smaller homes, but will pique the interest of anyone who’s currently using multiple Bridges to cover their whole house.
The Philips Hue Bridge Pro also promises to offer full home control, so you could rely on this Matter-compatible hub to manage more than just Philips Hue technology.
The other, much more interesting addition is Hue MotionAware tech, which promises to turn your lightbulbs into motion sensors. Exactly how this works hasn’t been revealed, so it’s not clear which Hue smart bulbs will support this upgrade, but it seems rooms with three bulbs or more will be able to detect people walking past and react accordingly.
It’s possible that it might use something like the ambient sensing technology that the Communication Standards Alliance showed off in a video earlier this year. Ambient sensing is a use case built by a company called Ivani to demonstrate what’s possible using the Zigbee wireless protocol (which is used by Philips Hue devices).
Now that would be smart, and might give me a reason to fill my home with smart bulbs.
Even with these serious leaks we should take details with a pinch of slat – though if you ask us it certainly seems it’s a matter of when not if Philips will debut the Bridge Pro.
IFA looks to be a likely event that’ll happen – given the Berlin tech show is due in only a couple of weeks and Philips has debuted tech there before – but we’ll have to wait and see.
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hamish.hector@futurenet.com (Hamish Hector)
