First reviews coming in. My housemate got his yesterday and we found it to be pretty similar to the following review:
Almost Plug and Play for a Simple Use Case
It’s super easy to set up. Out of the box, it’s ready to go as soon as you assign it to a room. At that point without your doing anything else detected motion will turn on any lights in that room attached to the hue bridge (including GE links or other brands).
It will turn on to full brightness between eight in the morning and 11 at night, but there’s also a lux sensor so it won’t turn them on at all if The light level is above the lux threshold.
From 11 at night until eight in the morning, it will turn them on at a dim “nightlight” level.
And after 15 minutes of inactivity, it will turn them off again. Those are all the presets. And that works just fine for many people.
Customizing is limited
There is some ability to customize it, but it’s pretty limited. You can change the light sensitivity, and there’s a very nice feature where you can see whether the current setting would trigger in the room at the present light level.
You can also change the motion sensitivity.
You can add up to two additional rooms to the same motion sensor so it can turn on a zone of lights.
Or instead of having it turn on all room lights, you can have it trigger a Hue scene. Getting this configured is not intuitive Unless you’re already used to scenes is in the new Hue app, but it can be done. Note however that a Hue scene is limited to the lights in one room and a light can only belong to one room so it will be very different than what you might be used to from some other apps.
A 24 hour day is always divided into two periods. “Day” and “night.” Night begins when day ends and vice versa. In order to change the ending time of day you change the beginning time of night.
At first it seems like you should need three time periods, one for daytime, one for evening, and one for late night, but because of the built in lux sensor Phillips assumes that you can get by with two . The lux sensor make sure that the lights don’t come on during the day if it’s bright.
So as long as your use case is simple, this is a very nice device. The review I linked to said there was a lag, but we found at our house it was quite quick, around half a second. We set it up in a room that already had the same model bulb and a smartthings branded motion sensor and the hue rule beat the ST rule every time, although not always by much.
Since my housemate just wanted the lights in the dressing room (which are hue whites in a cabinet fixture) to come on when he walks in there, he’s really happy. All of the presets work just fine for him.
The bad news: only the hue bridge can see it
The bad news is that at least for now the motion sensor activity is not reported to any external system, not even HomeKit. Nor SmartThings. So it’s just like the hue dimmer switch or the tap switch. The other systems can recognize a light coming on that was triggered by the trigger device, but they don’t get reports of the activity of the trigger device itself. That means it only works for one thing: to trigger hue lighting. That will work for some use cases, but not all.
So this is one of those devices that works great out of the box for many people, but will not handle the complex use cases that SmartThings power users are used to. 