The Glide light is very upfront with its purpose---it's just a cool wall light. While there are some smart features and plenty of options to customize, you're not going to get much more out of it than a decoration piece. But if you like the way it looks, there's little holding it back.

For $99.99 you get a great-looking light that can be completely controlled through the Govee app or via voice commands (we'll get to this in a bit). You can set the light to be whatever color you want, use some of the cool built-in animations and effects, and schedule the light to turn on and off automatically. The features are there, but let's see whether Govee implemented them well enough to be worth the money.

Table of Contents

• Straightforward Installation
• On the Wall
• Inside the App
• Exactly as Described

Straightforward Installation

When you open the box, you'll see that this light comes in many smaller pieces (around 11-inches long each, besides the smaller corner piece), which gave me a brief period of illusion that you would be able to customize the shape of the light. But unfortunately, that's only partially true, as the pieces you get are very limited, so there you can only create two shapes: a line and an "L" shape.

The pieces slot into each other, but connecting and disconnecting them can be quite the effort,  made all the worse by the fact that the finished product isn't very sturdy. I don't think it's going to come apart on your wall or anything like that, but with how difficult it is to connect and disconnect the pieces from each other, I was hoping for a firmer final product.

Fortunately, getting these on the wall is about as simple as it can be. Each piece comes preinstalled with command strips, so it's very easy to stick this light wherever you want and then plug it in. This also means that the Glide can be moved to another position if needed without damaging the wall. The power cord is limited to one specific piece, which does tie your hands a bit when it comes to cable management, but it wasn't that annoying to work around.

On the Wall

The Glide looks great once set up; the lights are bright and vivid, the colors come across accurately, and the animations you can enable are very smooth. While the Glide light is extremely simple conceptually, you can't take away that it succeeds at that concept.

Without a doubt, the presentation is where you see that $99.99 price tag come into effect, and with something like this, that's definitely what you want to see. The Glide lives or dies by its looks, so it's extremely important that Govee got this so right.

Inside the App

The Govee app is home to all sorts of settings to customize the Glide light. You have your standard brightness and color options of course, but there's a lot more to mess around with here. You can individually edit specific pieces of the light, set times for the light to automatically turn on and off, and create your own lighting effects that transition and animate between different colors (there's also a ton preloaded into the app, check out the video below for some examples). Anything you'd want to do with a light like this is accessible here, and it all works in real time so you can see how your settings change the light immediately.

There's even functionality with Google Assistant and Amazon Alexa. Setting the Glide up with my Google Home was a snap, and it works great despite the somewhat limited voice commands. On Google Home, all you can do with voice commands is change between solid colors, adjust the brightness, and turn on/off the light. Alexa does fare better allowing you to enable specific lighting effects through voice commands, but it would've been nice to see this with both platforms.

Exactly as Described

I mean, let's be frank here, the Glide cannot serve a practical function besides looking cool. It's meant for decoration through and through, and I can't think of a way it fails in that regard. While it would be nice if the pieces connected with less resistance, or if the voice commands were more in-depth, neither of these are major enough downsides to not recommend it.

At the end of the day, you get exactly what you expect out of the Glide---nothing more, nothing less. Looking at the rest of Govee's catalog and other similar wall lights, the $99.99 price tag is understandable, even though I think it's a bit steep for what amounts to a big light bar.

Basically, it doesn't look the part of a lighting arrangement that costs $90, but at the same time, I also think that's a fair price for what's on offer. But that has more to do with style than anything else, and at the end of the day, this is a product you can decide if you should buy just by looking at pictures. If you like the way it looks, then I have no doubt you'll love it, but if you're iffier on it, having it in person is not going to change your mind.