Sony's LED bulb is a shower-head speaker for your eyes
Sony has announced its hybrid smart bulb and wireless speaker will be available for the first time in the US in summer 2016.
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Remember Rolly, the self-propelled MP3 speaker? Remember AIBO, the robotic dog? Well, Sony has been burning the midnight (hemp) oil again and come up with some more weirdness here at this year's CES in Las Vegas.
The first is the Glass Sound Speaker, which uses "the vibration of organic glass" -- yeah, that stuff that opera singers shatter -- to generate sound in your living space; and the second device is a light bulb speaker.
The "LED Bulb Speaker" is a hybrid smart bulb and shower-head-style speaker that screws into a standard light bulb socket, which provides it the power it needs. The LED Bulb Speaker is controlled via a Bluetooth app (SongPal) or an adapter that can turn it on or off.
Like competing bulbs from Philips, the Bulb Speaker can display numerous different colors -- up to 192 different ones.
According to Design Milk, the bulb is capable of 360-lumen brightness and the speaker can output at a fairly small 2W of power. As you can see in the video above, we had to put our ears to it to hear the music, though admittedly the CES show floor is noisy.
The light bulb appeared in May 2015 in Japan, where it was called the LSPX-100E26J. The speaker is due to be released in the US this summer, but pricing and other availability have not yet been announced.
