Is theNanoleaf Umbra Cub Smart Lampa worthwhile light source with a nifty place to store your stuff in the base? Yes, it is, but it’s also much more than that. With support for Thread mesh networks and any Matter-compatible smart home hub, it’s also a lamp you’re able to be sure will accept commands from your phone or smart speaker. Is that, taken together, enough to justify its $130 cost?
Nanoleaf Umbra Cup Smart Lamp
The Nanoleaf Umbra Cup Smart Lamp is a smart lamp that supports Thread and Matter-compatible smart hubs. The lamp offers over 16 million colors, brightness up to 320 lumens, and a practical yet distinctive design.
Intriguing, Understated Design
The Nanoleaf Umbra Cup Smart Lamp is born from a collaboration between Nanoleaf, maker of excellent smart lighting, and Umbra, maker of cool stuff in general. In essence, it’s a cup with a lamp growing out of the middle. This uncommon design makes the lamp an ideal option for an office, as it provides a place to store your pins and maybe a notepad. You probably won’t want to drop your phone in there, though. There isn’t wireless charging, but there is a USB-A port in the back you can use to charge your phone instead. Also, the metal might scratch your screen. Yes, the lamp is made of metal, except for the knob you twist at the bottom to power the light on and off.
LED lights are hidden along the bottom of the lamp’s hood. You can’t see them unless you’re actively searching. Their light is cast downward, providing good ambient task lighting but not enough radiance to brighten a room. The lamp is most at home on a desk or a bedside table.
On the whole, the lamp feels like a purchase that can stand the test of time, were it not for the irreplaceable lights. They come with an expected lifespan of up to ten years. As I write this, I have a regular lamp next to me that I think I got from a thrift store almost two decades ago, and who knows how old it already was before that? Like many smart home products, you’re investing a lot of money in something that won’t last nearly as long.
The Cup Smart Lamp comes in one color: black. It’s the light that provides personalization. These bulbs provide 320 lumens and are capable of displaying over 16 million colors. To change the color from the default red, you’re going to need to download an app.
An Easy Set-Up Process
Using the Cup Smart Lamp requires downloading the Nanoleaf app, available foriPhoneandAndroid, and creating an account. I’m not keen on this, since it means the product likely stops working if the company and its servers ever go down. Nonetheless, such is the way most smart home gadgets work.
The Nanoleaf app serves as a hub that lets you organize your smart gadgets room by room. To add the Cup Smart Lamp, all you need to do is scan a barcode included with the manual in the box. You can also pair manually over Bluetooth.
Ideally, you first create a room, then add a device. In my case, I created a room called “Office” and named the lamp “Office Lamp.” That’s it, you’re done.
Nanoleaf’s interface is pretty intuitive and would probably make for an easy way to organize your smart home gadgets, like yourNanoleaf Skylightsor your4D immersive TV backlighting. On the other hand, if you don’t have said devices, then the interface looks kind of spartan.
How to Control Your Light
There’s a knob on the lamp that you can twist to turn on the light. That’s all the knob does, and you need to use the app to do anything more. The lamp’s default color is red, so very few of us would be happy using it out of the box without downloading the app.
This lamp would be overkill for such a use case anyway. You want to play with colors, and there are no shortage of ways to do so. Eight presets are available for saving your favorite hues, which can be any one of the 16 million tones you select from the color wheel. The lamp’s light changes as you move your finger along the colors, so you can see how colors look in real time. When you find the shades you like, save, and be on your way.
Changing Light Based on the Time of Day
One of the eight available presets is reserved for the option to change your light based on the time of day. To my eyes, this is one of the biggest advantages of a smart lamp. In an office, you can have the light set bright in the morning, off in midday, and dim at night. You can have the light turn red as the sun sets to ease you into sleep, ideal for a lamp on your bedside table.
The lamp can adjust time based on the sunrise and sunset in your location, or you may set the time manually. Setting my location automatically wasn’t a viable option for me, since the app doesn’t let me distinguish between different US states. Entering the city “Richmond” brings up many identical entries labeled “Richmond, US.”
Use Light to Set the Mood
Want to keep things interesting at your next party? Place the smart lamp next to your snacks and have it change from blue to pink to yellow on rotation. In the Nanoleaf app, this is known as creating a “scene.”
You can save multiple scenes, just as you can with static colors. In this case, you aren’t limited to eight. One of the default scenes, known as “date night,” slowly fluctuates between different shades of red.
Another option called “northern lights” shifts between seven colors that you would expect to see in the aurora borealis. Here the transitions happen at twice the speed.
Several scenes come included, and you may create your own. Pick your colors, tell the app how long you want to linger at each one, and set how quickly you want the light to shift. Do you want pulsing lights or a barely noticeable transition?
If you create a bunch and find you switch between them often, you can save some scenes as favorites.
Comfortable in Any Smart Home
The Cup Smart Lamp uses the Nanoleaf app, but it is compatible with many different smart home ecosystems. It supports Thread, meaning it can work with other Thread-enabled devices to create a mesh network that doesn’t suffer from the weaknesses of a smart home dependent on Wi-Fi and a single hub. If you do have a hub already, as long as it supports Matter, you can connect to it, too. This includes ecosystems such as Apple HomeKit, Google Home, and Samsung Smartthings. In short, the Cup Smart Lamp is likely compatible with your smart home network, regardless of which ones you’ve bought into.
You won’t be missing out on much if you’re not already invested in one of these ecosystems already. The most noticeable feature you lose is voice control, such as telling Amazon’s Alexa to turn on your light rather than having to whip out your phone. You would also need to buy a smart speaker for that privilege, since the lamp isn’t capable of hearing commands on its own.
Should You Buy the Nanoleaf Umbra Cup Smart Lamp?
What theNanoleaf Umbra Cup Smart Lampsets out to do, it does pretty well. The app is intuitive enough, even though I wish it weren’t necessary. The lamp responds instantly to your input, assuming the Wi-Fi isn’t acting up. It has a muted style that probably won’t attract much attention while off, but the fun is there, hidden in plain sight.
Yet $130 is quite a bit of money for a lamp, even a smart one. You can get something playful that changes colors for a quarter of the price. Or you can buy whichever lamp you want, then stick in a $20 Matter A19 light bulb that is also capable of changing colors and all the other features I described above. That’s right, you don’t gain anything extra by choosing the Cup Smart Lamp over other Nanoleaf lights. Going that route mitigates the risk of the lamp being useless if the company goes away, since you can simply swap out the bulb, and there’s a good chance you will have also spent less money.
At the end of the day, Nanoleaf and Umbra have made a pretty good product. It’s well-made and integrates with all the major existing ecosystems. If this specific use case is exactly what you’re looking for, and you really like the idea of storing stuff at the base of your lamp, then you probably won’t be disappointed.
