Why You Can Trust CNET Sengled Solo Color Plus LED review: This colorful smart bulb can sing, but it doesn't shine
Sengled's newest Bluetooth speaker bulb can change colors, too -- but those colors are only about as bright as a typical nightlight.
- 10 years product testing experience with the CNET Home team
Sengled makes an ever-growing variety of smart LED light bulbs, including ones with built-in cameras and Wi-Fi extenders. One of the original offerings was a smart bulb that doubled as a Bluetooth speaker . This year, Sengled has a new version called the Solo Color Plus that'll change colors, too.
The Good
The Bad
The Bottom Line
Despite the suggested retail price of $80, Sengled's color-changing speaker bulb can currently be had for $50 on Amazon. (It's £66 in the UK. That converts to about AU$120.) That's just a few dollars more than what you'd spend on the Lifx Mini LED, and more or less on par with the price of a color-changing bulb from Philips Hue. Neither of those options will double as a Bluetooth speaker.
That, coupled with the fact that you can set a sleep timer that'll turn the light and music off after a set period of time, might make it an appealing pick for something like a bedside lamp, where the close-range nature of its speaker would allow for easy music and podcast listening before bed.
Outside of that, it's a tough bulb to recommend. Lifx and Hue are both much, much brighter, and each offers in-app controls and smart lighting features that are far superior to Sengled's. On top of that, the Solo Color Plus -- unlike other Sengled bulbs -- doesn't work with any larger smart home platforms or voice control assistants. That makes it mediocre at best among smart bulbs, and really only worth it if that built-in speaker is a must-have. Even then, there are other Bluetooth speaker bulbs out there that cost less.
The top face of the Solo Color Plus serves as a mini diaphragm and dust cap for the built-in Bluetooth speaker.
Space-age design
Lots of today's LED light bulbs go out of their way to mimic the look of traditional incandescent bulbs, but most smart bulbs tend to tack in a more futuristic direction. Sengled is no exception. Its bulbs have always featured eye-catching designs that make no secret of the fact that these aren't ordinary lights.
In the case of the Solo Color Plus, that eye-catching design is a bulb in the shape of a conical frustum -- basically a flat-topped cone (like a lampshade, or a Rolo candy). The top face of the bulb is the speaker's diaphragm and dust cap, while the bulb itself is made from an unusually tough and durable plastic. It all makes for a sturdy, weighty light that comes in at just over half a pound (240 grams) -- perhaps too heavy for something like a bendable flex lamp.
Screw the bulb in and turn it on and it'll light up at its default, soft white setting. It will also begin to broadcast Bluetooth pairing requests. Sync it up with your phone, and you'll be able to play music through it. To change the color, dim the light up and down, or start a sleep timer, you'll need to download the Sengled Pulse app to your Android or iOS device. If your phone is paired to the bulb over Bluetooth, the app will automatically offer up lighting controls as soon as you open it.
A word of caution, there: If, for whatever reason, your phone has a habit of dropping Bluetooth connections, then you'll need to re-pair with the bulb in your phone's settings whenever that happens before being able to access the in-app controls again. A Zigbee smart lighting kit like the Philips Hue White or a Wi-Fi smart bulb like the Lifx Mini would both be good alternatives.
The Sengled Solo Color Plus (left) vs. the Lifx Mini (right).
Pretty (dim) colors
The Solo Color Plus worked as promised when I tested it out, but I didn't come away impressed. The app is basic and clumsy, with futzy color controls and a stuttering brightness slider that doesn't dim smoothly. You can't schedule automated lighting changes, either. In fact, there really aren't any features or integrations beyond the Bluetooth speaker, the music sync mode, a couple of color-changing presets and the ability to put the bulb and the music on a sleep timer that shuts them both off automatically after a set period of time (and no, it doesn't slowly fade them out).
With a tap, you can sync Sengled's colors with whatever music you're playing on your phone.
On top of that, the performance is poor. Our spectrometer clocked the bulb's brightest setting -- the soft white default -- at 556 lumens, which is really only bright enough to serve as an accent light. Sengled is at least honest about this fact, listing the lumen count at 550 on the box and correctly labeling the bulb as a 40-watt replacement. But still, competing smart bulbs from Lifx, Philips Hue, Sylvania and others are all brighter, and more capable of serving as the primary light source for a room.
As for the colors, all of them are remarkably dim. Every color-changing bulb will see the lumen count drop with fully saturated colors that don't make use of the white-light diodes, but a good one should still be able to get most of the colors up above 100 lumens. Take the Lifx Plus LED, for example. It puts out 392 lumens at the yellow setting, 315 at the cyan setting, and 148 at the red setting.
By comparison, the Sengled bulb puts out 26 lumens at yellow, 24 at cyan and a measly 10 at red. In fact, none of the colors I tested came in any higher than 30 lumens. That's barely bright enough to qualify as a nightlight.
One other big omission: The Solo Color Plus doesn't offer tunable white light settings. You get the yellowy, soft white default, you get the RGB colors, and you get a single daylight-tinted white-light setting called "Energy" that only puts out a pathetic 32 lumens. None of those colors or presets are dimmable, either -- you can only dim the bulb at its default, soft white setting.
The other big problem with this bulb is that it doesn't work with any larger smart home platforms or voice assistants. You can connect it with your phone, but you can't connect it with anything else.
That leaves the built-in Bluetooth speaker as something of a saving grace. It isn't terribly powerful, but it still puts out clean, crisp sound that's honestly pretty good, all things considered. Still, if that's all that you're interested in, other bulbs, like this $15 dumb LED from Ecosmart, offer the same feature for less money.
The verdict
If you want a smart bulb you can control from your phone, there are better options. If you want a bulb that changes colors, there are better options. If you want a bulb with a built-in speaker, you don't have to pay this much.
If you're dead-set on getting a light bulb that can do all of those things, Sengled's Solo Color Plus LED technically fits the bill, but I still can't recommend it. It isn't nearly bright enough in either sense of the word, and, at its sale price of $50, it still costs about twice as much as it's actually worth.