Govee Glow H6050 smart lamp review: light and color with a touch of elegance
At this point, I’m sure we’re all pretty familiar with smart LED light bulbs and LED strips that can be used for regular or accented lighting around our homes. Since the technology has become pretty commonplace, some brands have started branching out with more stylized LED lighting products like programmable LED wall panels and decorative lamps that allow for custom lighting in a room while also acting as a decorative piece.
The new Govee Glow Smart Table Lamp serves that exact purpose. The cylindrical body is supported by a round base with touch-sensitive buttons to turn the lamp on/off, adjust the brightness and change the colors.
The overall design is fairly neutral, but the brushed aluminum look will definitely fit in better in a room with a more contemporary aesthetic. Officially listed as the Govee H6050, the Glow Smart Table Lamp does exactly what the name implies. The RGB LED, housed in the base, illuminates the cylinder, allowing it to glow through the hundreds of perforations in the aluminum casing. The single LED isn’t bright enough to light up a room, but the soft glow can be used as a reading light if you have it placed on a table next to you.
Since there are quite a few “smart” products that force you to rely exclusively on their apps to change the settings, I appreciate the buttons that are built into the base of the lamp. No one wants to be forced to open an app to turn on a lamp or use voice commands with a Google Assistant or Alexa device, especially at night when people might be sleeping. That being said, if you want full control over the colors or want more refined brightness settings, the Govee Home is a requirement.
Getting the Govee Glow set up and connected to the app takes less than a minute with the app also offering simple instructions on how to sync the lamp with your Google or Alexa smart assistant if you want to control it with voice commands as well. The app also enables you to take advantage of smart settings like setting a schedule for when the lamp should turn on or off, allowing the lamp to change colors with the beat of the music you’re listening to, and creating preset scenes which will automatically rotate through predefined color sequences or ones that you create yourself.
Since the lamp’s LED is at the base of the lamp, it can only display one color at a time. It makes for a cool effect when the brightness is turned down to its lowest setting since the intensity of the light fades as it reaches the top. That being said, I do wish that Govee would have equipped the lamp with 6-8 additional RGBIC LEDs inside the cylinder so that it could glow multiple colors at once.
As mentioned already, you can also use your favorite voice assistant to control the Govee Glow. You can ask Google Assistant or Alexa to turn the lamp on or off, set it to a specific brightness or even change the color. If you have different rooms set up in your house with multiple LED lights, you can add the lamp to a specific group so that they can all be controlled together. Since I have multiple smart LED lights that I use in my office, it’s nice to be able to turn them all on or off with a single voice command, especially since I often forget to turn them off when I leave the office when I’m done for the day.
If you’re trying to decide between the Govee Aura and the Govee Glow, there are two things to keep in mind. The Govee Aura is significantly brighter than the Govee Glow and it sports more than a dozen RGBIC LEDs on the inside that allows it to display hundreds of different color combinations at once which allow for some truly unique lighting effects.
That being said, the Govee Glow looks a lot more elegant than the Aura, making it a better fit for those looking for an accent light to help decorate a room.
The Govee Glow Smart Desk Lamp sells for $69.99 but is currently on sale for $49.99. I wasn’t a big fan of the look when I first pulled it out of the box, but it’s definitely grown on me over the past few weeks. Having another accent light in my office is definitely nice, especially one that looks good even when turned off. The only thing on my wish list for a second-gen version would be multiple RGBIC LEDs on the inside to allow for more unique lighting options.
