Josh Hendrickson
Alongside announced new options for its Shape series, Nanoleaf took the wraps off a new Essential smart lighting line. As the name suggests, it fits the more traditional mold with an affordable $20 smart bulb and $50 LED strip. And unlike the Nanoleaf products that came before, Essentials uses Thread for smart home communication.
A Light Bulb With an Edgy Profile
First up in the Essentials Line is the new $20 Nanoleaf Essentials bulb. It’s hard to remember sometimes, but its first product was a smart bulb that it introduced on Kickstarter.
Nanoleaf’s latest light bulb calls back to that heritage, thanks to its rhombicosidodecahedron shape. For those of you who aren’t geometry majors, that’s a solid with 20 regular triangular faces, 30 square faces, 12 regular pentagonal faces, 60 vertices, and 120 edges.
The Nanoleaf Essentials bulb comes in an A19 sizing and supports 16M+ colors and tunable whites. According to Gimmy Chu, CEO of Nanoleaf, while it can handle colors, a lot of focus went into white lighting. According to the company, the Essentials bulb offers the widest max brightness range across all color temperatures.
An Expandable LED Strip
Nanoleaf didn’t just announce a light bulb. It also announced the Essential LED strip. It comes in two formats, a $50 2-meter starter kit and a $25 1-meter expansion kit. It’s an RGBCCWW LED strip, and so provides dedicated cool and warm white lighting. Like the Essentials Bulb, Nanoleaf says it put a lot of effort into providing the best white lighting possible, as it sees that as the most useful function of the strip.
Thread and Smart Home Features
The original Nanoleaf Light Bulb was a Bluetooth affair, which limited its capability. While the new Essentials line supports Bluetooth, Nanoleaf also integrated the Thread standard into the devices. That means it can form a mesh network with any other Thread devices, so you get faster response times and better reliability.
These are smart lights as well, so you’ll get the usual app and voice controls. The LED strip also has a control module, much like the Nanoleaf Shapes lighting. Additionally, Essentials lights come with a Circadian rhythm feature. When you enable it, the lights will shift color temperatures subtly to match the time of day.
Nanoleaf didn’t announce when the Essentials line would launch yet, but you can sign up for notifications on its site when it’s ready to reveal more.
