Today Philips Lighting, a Royal Philips (NYSE: PHG, AEX: PHIA) company and global leader in lighting, releases the much-anticipated new Philips Hue gen 2 app for iOS and Android. With a fresh new design and intuitive interface, the new Philips Hue gen 2 app now features ‘Rooms’ meaning that you can group all of the lights in one room together to control them all at the same time; ‘Routines’ which are light schedules you create to support your daily activities; and ‘Scenes’ which extract the color palette from any picture to create a unique atmosphere personal to you. Through the new home dashboard, you can see an overview of all the lights across your home, and also switch them all on, off or to dim them with just a tap or a swipe.

Philips releases the much-anticipated new Philips Hue gen 2 app for iOS and Android. (Philips/LEDinside)

“Philips Hue was the world’s first connected lighting system for the home a little over three years ago, and since then it has become the system of choice for consumers,” says Sridhar Kumaraswamy, Business Leader Connected Home Systems at Philips Lighting. “As the Philips Hue ecosystem has grown with products, apps and partnerships with leading smart home platforms, so have our consumers. They want to do so much more with our connected lights, and with the new Philips Hue gen 2 app they can. It was designed for them, tested by them, taking their feedback onboard, and today’s new app gives them more control and creative freedom than ever before.”

New features

Rooms. With the new Philips Hue gen 2 app you can control all the lights in a room or specific area at the same time, instantly. It’s easy to set up, taking just a few seconds, and was the most popular new feature when tested by consumers. Simply go to ‘Settings,’ ‘Room set-up’ and select the lights you wish to control; then all you need to do is name the room as you wish. As Philips Hue can be voice activated, with this new feature you can control the lights in a room through one voice command, such as “Set the living room to 10 percent” to create a cozy atmosphere.

Routines. With routines you can set lights schedules to support your day to day activities, from the moment you wake up in the morning until you go to bed at night. The white light recipes in the Philips Hue gen 2 app are designed to help you throughout the day when concentrating on work, reading, relaxing, to get energized or unwind at night. With ‘Wake up’ routine you can set your Philips Hue lights to naturally wake you up in the morning as they gently increase in brightness mimicking the rise of the sun. For those with young children who have to get up in the middle of the night, ‘Nightlight’ is a new light recipe which delivers a low level of light. Also it minimizes exposure to blue light, lessening the disturbance to your sleep cycle. Focusing on the power of white light, soon to be launched Philips Hue white ambiance perfectly complements the routines feature by delivering every shade, from cool daylight (6500k) to warm white (2200k).

Scenes. Featuring a new, smarter way to create personalized light scenes, the new Philips Hue gen 2 app extracts the color palette from any picture you have chosen and automatically selects the five best colors to create a vibrant mood. Adding to this, you can also create your own unique scenes by selecting a light and choosing from more than 16 million colors and every shade of white light, the possibilities are limitless. To get you inspired, there are a number of new preset scenes in the app such as spring blossom, savanna sunset, artic aurora and tropical twilight.

Widgets. For quick and easy control of your Philips Hue lights you can use the new widget feature. Quick to set up and even quicker to access from drop down menu on the home screen, you can have up to 10 widgets that combine multiple rooms and scenes at once, giving you easy access to your favorite light settings.

Home & Away. Enjoy complete peace of mind by controlling your lights to turn on and off when you’re away from home, thereby simulating your presence using the Home & Away feature. You also never need to worry about arriving home in the dark again or turning the lights off before you leave home by turning on the location setting, it will automate this for you without you having to look for your smart device.

Delivering the best lighting experience for the home is at the heart of Philips Hue, and the key to this is being interoperable with apps, products and platforms from other brands and developers. Philips Hue works seamlessly with Amazon Alexa, Apple HomeKit, Bosch, Nest, Samsung SmartThings as well as other smart home devices and wearables to truly transform how you experience and interact with light in your home.