Smart lighting has come a long way from the odd bulb or light strip. Decorative smart lighting comes in as many forms as you can imagine. Among those are light Panels, allowing you to take any uninspired wall and make it whatever you want, all from your phone or a simple voice command to your favourite smart home system. Govee, the manufacturer of virtually every variety of smart lights in existence, has released the next step to their Govee Glide Hexagon lights with their new and improved Govee Glide Hexagon Ultra, a light set with the same shape, but providing a whole new look.
The Govee Glide Hexagon Ultra light set comes with ten panels, all of the appropriate electronic connection cables, power supply, a power control panel and additional velcro wall mounts should the ones that come on the panels need to be replaced. The hexagonal shape of the Ultra’s panels are, unsurprisingly, the same hexagonal shape as their predecessor, with one major difference. There are additional lights in a Y shape along the inside of the panel to make each hexagon look like a 3D rendering of a cube, unleashing a slew of brand-new lighting options.
The setup of the large Govee Glide Hexagon Ultra panels was astonishingly easy, given its size and number of panels. There are a number of suggested layouts on a provided sheet in the box, but you can set up the panels in any array you choose. In the box, there are cardboard hexagons that are 1:1 scale to the light panels that you can use to mock up your light configuration. From there, your setup is done one step at a time with the help of the Govee Home App.
“The setup of the large Govee Glide Hexagon Ultra panels was astonishingly easy, given its size and number of panels.”
Within the App, you set up the lighting configuration as you set up individual lights. After setting up the first panel in the Hexagon Ultra set, connect it to the Govee Home App, and it will prompt you to draw out the layout of the lights by adding new panels to other adjacent panels. You will also be asked to confirm which light in the array is the one that will connect to the power.
From there, it will instruct you which light to set up next and which of the six ports from each panel you need to connect your cables to. When this is completed correctly, the lights will work in perfect sync with each other. The velcro wall mounts let you easily remove the panels to let you change out the cable should you set it up incorrectly.
After it is all setup, the application becomes the canvas on which you paint your decorative masterpiece. You have a huge number of presets to work with based on specific themes. Among the themes are natural, life and emotion. Each of these animated scenes can still be customized by adjusting the brightness, direction and speed of the animations.
Static colour schemes are easy to set up as well. You can just select the panel on a virtual mockup of your layout and select from millions of colour combinations. They even help you out with colour schemes for some of your favourite things. They have suggested holiday colours and specific palettes for your country’s flag or your favourite sports team. Save the provided colours and set them as favourites before designing your layout.
“The Govee Glide Hexagon Light Panels Ultra’s quality is amazing.”
There are also light configurations that can react to the sounds around you. By selecting the Music mode, you can choose to have the lights react to the sound in your room by using a microphone mounted on the device or by the mic on your phone. The sensitivity can be adjusted to ensure it doesn’t react to any audio that you don’t want it to. The varying themes within the Music Mode change the way the panels react to sound.
You can go even further by delving into the DIY mode of the app, allowing you to customize every aspect of your lighting experience to make your own version of those beautifully synchronous scene presets. As would be expected, control of these lights can be connected to Amazon Alexa and Google Home Services, letting you control the Govee Glide Hexagon Light Panels Ultra alongside the other devices in your room, either via their apps or via voice commands into Amazon or Google’s speakers.
The Govee Glide Hexagon Light Panels Ultra’s quality is amazing. The gorgeously brilliant colours and smooth animations (at least smooth when the animation speed is higher) create a visual symphony on your wall. Their ease of use out of the box is also a huge plus to the panels, as is the ability to directly connect a second set of ten panels to the entire setup, which I am strongly considering doing to add to my decor.
The evolution of these lights from the flat hexagon to the 3D cube has opened up many new lighting possibilities without removing the capabilities of the previous model. My only complaint surrounds the learning curve around the DIY mode, prohibiting you from jumping right into customizing the lights to your exact liking.
The Govee Glide Hexagon Light Panels Ultra are available on Govee’s website and on Amazon for the pretty steep price of $349.99 USD. It is certainly not unexpected in the smart light market. New kits come in at pretty hefty prices all the time. What these lights can do and how they look in the process of doing it matters, and this light kit is, by far, my favourite that I have ever seen.
