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Brace yourselves for more Alexa lamps
Alexa-enabled devices are pretty ubiquitous these days, especially speakers with the Amazon tech built in. The same can't be said of smart lamps, however, with the C by GE Sol a rare exception. Amazon just released a design reference that gives third-party manufacturers a leg up in creating their own white-box products that use Alexa. Amazon has chosen two speakers (from Junlam and Narui) and one smart lamp from Adition, each of which have been approved by Amazon.
Olie lamp includes a voice assistant and wireless charging
It seems like everyone is building in Alexa or Google Assistant smarts to their speakers, thermostats and cars these days. If you haven't yet had enough of devices you can talk to, the Olie lamp over at Indiegogo might interest you. It's a cute little desk, floor or table lamp that will have a voice assistant from Amazon or Google and a neat little Qi wireless charging station built right in (to the table-sized Olie).
LG's first smart light bulb flashes when you get a phone call
LG isn't about to let household heavyweights like Philips corner the connected lighting space -- it just unveiled the Smart Lamp, its first take on the concept. The 10W LED bulb gives Android and iOS users a familiar level of control over their illumination, including a light-based alarm clock and a security mode that pretends you're at home. There are a couple of noteworthy tricks in this initial offering, however. The light connects through both Bluetooth and WiFi, letting it pull the sync-based stunts we've seen in a few other bulbs: it can flash when you get a phone call, or (with Android) pulse to the beat of the music. The Smart Lamp is more expensive than ordinary LEDs at 35,000 won ($32) in LG's native Korea, but it could be a good deal if you don't need the many-colored lighting of Hue and similar systems. Unfortunately, there's no word on whether or not it's coming to the US.
Gigabyte Smart Lamp doubles as an Ultrabook hub, is missing a few ports (hands-on)
Things we expected to see at the world's premier computer show: mainstream notebooks, gaming notebooks, thin notebooks ("pineapple shrimp, lemon shrimp"), maybe even a tablet or two. But a desk lamp? Not so much. And yet, that might be the most memorable thing Gigaybte is showing here at Computex. The Smart Lamp is, as you'd expect, a proper light, one you can use on four different brightness settings. But it also doubles as a laptop hub, with a DVD player built into the base, along with a handful of other ports. These include two USB sockets, dual headphone / earphone jacks and an SD reader. It's a neat idea, to be sure -- who doesn't love two-in-one devices - but considering it's supposed to supplement the ports normally found on Ultrabooks, it seems to be missing quite a few big ones. Why not throw in an HDMI port, or some other kind of display output? Ooh, or how about an Ethernet jack? Or a DVD drive that can burn discs in addition to play them? Anyway, you can color us slightly disappointed after having gotten an up-close look, even if the concept itself deserves an 'A' for creativity. No word yet on how much this will cost, when it will go on sale or in which countries it will be available. Until then, check out the walk-through video below -- not that this thing needs much further explanation.%Gallery-190369%
