Hi, I'm Rich Brown for CNET with the top pick for our holiday gift-guide for the appliances category.
And for this category we've chosen the Philips Hue Connected Bulb Starting Pack.
So this is a set of three LED light bulbs and they come with the controller that you connect to your home wireless network.
Once it's all set up, you can use your smartphone or connected mobile device to control these lights in all kinds of interesting and fun ways.
So behind me, you'll see these four lights each of them
has a hue bulb in it and they light up pretty much like you'd expect from a traditional light bulb.
It looks great.
There's a whole range of color temperatures you can set if you wanted to go from a warmer light to a bluer light.
It all looks pretty comfortable and familiar but dig into the app and you'll see you can make the lights be a little more festive.
Now, beyond colors you can set a whole different range of program and options for these lights.
You can set individual bulbs or groups of bulbs to go off on either a timer, with an alarm or the geolocation feature that ties into your smartphone's GPS.
And it will tell the lights to shut off if you leave the house or turn on when you come back home.
For more advance users, hue ties into the IFTT standard, which is IFTTT or If This Then That, which is a service that ties into all kinds of different online services like Facebook and Twitter.
And through IFTTT, you can tell your lights to blink every time you're tagged into Facebook post or maybe turn green when your particular stock is up.
All kinds of different options are available through IFTTT and it's really fun to play with if you have the time.
So the reason the hue bulbs are our top pick for this category is because, even though they're about a year old,
they're still one of the most fun, smart home devices that we've seen.
It's easy to install, easy to set up and everyone pretty much gets it.
Whether you wanna use the hue as a standard light bulb or maybe a more fun, sort of, party novelty, there's a whole lot of appeal here and the price at $199 isn't really that bad.
It's something we'd all like to receive as a gift and for that reason that's our top pick for this category.
So I'm Rich Brown, this is the Philips Hue Connected Bulb Starting Pack.
