Philips Hue Festavia review: String lights with smarts to spare

Philips Hue sure took its time getting into the holiday LED string light market, but the company’s delightful Festavia lights are worth the wait.

Fitting seamlessly into the Hue ecosystem, the 250-LED Festavia string lights look appropriately festive, and they can be grouped with your existing Hue lights or with addtional Festavia strings. The lights will also sync with music–with some caveats, anyway–and they work with the three big smart-home ecosystems, including Amazon’s Alexa, Apple’s HomeKit, and Google Home.

On the downside, some of the flashier string-light effects we’ve seen from the likes of Twinkly aren’t supported on the Hue Festavia, and the Festavia’s power brick is on the hefty side. It’s also worth noting that the Festavia lights are designed for indoor use only, so those looking to decorate their exterior of their homes should look elsewhere.

Priced at $160, the Hue Festavia lights are a tad pricey for smart string lights, although that won’t come as a surprise to Hue aficionados.

Hue says the Festavia lights are exclusively available through its website; at the time of publication, the lights were listed as “coming soon.”

This review is part of TechHive’s in-depth coverage of the best smart lights.

The Philips Hue Festavia lights come wrapped around a square cardboard reel, which you can keep and use for off-season storage. Unwrapped, the Festavia lights look pretty much like a garden-variety string of LED lights, with the string itself having a dark-green color that will blend nicely in the branches of a Christmas tree. 

How long is the Philips Hue Festavia string?

The Festivia string is roughly 65 feet long and includes 250 color LEDs, which are spaced about 3.15 inches apart, while a compact in-line module for the Festavia’s wireless radios sits near the end.

At the very end of the string is a cylindrical screw-on connector that attaches to a chunky 1.5-pound, 32-watt power supply, while a thick power cable terminates in a standard two-prong wall plug; you can mount the power supply on a wall using the two mounting holes on opposite corners of the brick. All told, there’s about seven feet of cord from the plug to the first LED.

The individual LEDs on the Festavia string can each glow in up to 16 million colors, and they’re also white-tunable from a warm 2,200 Kelvin to a daylight 6,500K. 

The Festavia string light is designed for indoor use only; its IP20 rating is only good for ingress protection against finger-width objects, and offers no protection at all from water. Also, you can’t daisy-chain multiple strings together. That said, you can group two or more Festavia strings using the Hue app.

As with other Philips Hue lights, the Festavia string lights can be controlled via Bluetooth using the Hue app, allowing you to adjust the colors and brightness, set scenes, put the lights on a timer, and control them with Alexa and Google Assistant voice commands. But if you want to group the Festavia lights with other Hue lights, use them in automations, or control them when you’re away from home, you’ll need to invest in the Hue Bridge (if you don’t own one already).

How do you set up the Philips Hue Festavia lights?

If you know how to drape holiday lights on a Christmas tree, along a wall, or over another suitable object, you know everything you need to know about the physical setup of the Festavia string lights. Folks decorating a tree will want to start from the bottom, as Philips Hue suggests, lest you run into any problems with the power cord. Otherwise, there’s really not much to it.

Once you have the Festavia lights arranged the way you like, it’s time to connect them to the Hue app. I already have a Hue Bridge and a collection of Hue lights in my home, so I simply tapped the three-dot button in the top corner of the Hue app’s home screen and selected “Add lights.”

Within seconds, the app found the Festavia lights and paired them with the Hue Bridge. I then added the lights to my “Downstairs” room of Hue lights, and then adjusted their behavior for a couple of key lighting scenes, such as my daylight and nighttime scenes.

The setup process is similar for those using Bluetooth to control their Hue lights, except (as I previously explained), you won’t be able to group the Festivia lights in a room with other Hue lights unless you have a Hue hub (in which case, you won’t be using Bluetooth).

How do you control the Hue Festavia string lights?

Opening the Hue app and tapping on the Festavia’s tile reveals the most basic controls for the lights. You can power them on and off (of course), adjust the brightness by swiping a slider, and change the white color temperature by dragging an icon around a color wheel.

When setting the Festavia lights to color mode, you get three options: Linear, which lets you pick three different colors that are displayed in a linear fashion along the string; Mirrored, which makes half of the string display three segments of colors and then reverses the order for the second half; and Scattered, which randomly distributes five colors that you’ve chosen.

You can save any of the modes that you’ve customized as scenes, which can be triggered manually or in routines. There are also three animated scenes to choose from: Candle, Fireplace, and Sparkle.

If you’ve grouped the Festavia lights in a room with other Hue lights, you can set that entire room to a specific scene, either one you’ve created yourself or one from the rapidly growing Hue scene gallery, which now boasts a few dozen eye-catching (and, optionally, animated) light scenes). The effect can be quite striking, especially if you have other color-enabled Hue lights or lamps in the room.

Can the Hue Festavia string lights sync with music?

The Festavia lights can flash and pulse to the tune of, say, “Jingle Bells,” but only under certain circumstances.

If you’re a Spotify user, you’re in luck. The Hue app offers an integration that syncs any Hue light or light group to your Spotify tunes using metadata piped in directly from the streaming service. Thanks to that metadata, the music syncing is far more precise than when a built-in mic is detecting the beat; but again, this particular Hue integration only works with Spotify, not Amazon Music, Apple Music, or any other Spotify competitor.

Those who don’t subscribe to Spotify can, indeed, fall back on microphone-driven music synching, which lacks the precision of metadata but works with any music source. But here’s the catch when it comes to native music syncing of Hue lights with a mic: It requires using the Samsung SmartThings app, and only on Samsung Galaxy phones, which leaves iPhone and Pixel users in the lurch.

Do the Hue Festavia lights work with smart routines?

As with any other Hue lights, the Hue Festavia lights work seamlessly with smart routines, from the automations available in the Hue app to routines on Amazon’s Alexa, Google Home, and Apple’s HomeKit.

Focusing on native routines, the Hue app makes it easy to create wake up, sleep, sunrise, sunset, and customized automations that let you run your lights (including the Festavia string lights) on a schedule. 

You can also set your Hue lights to turn off and on when you leave or arrive home (based on location data from phone), while a new “mimic presence” feature intelligently adjusts your lights while you’re away, perfect for convincing would-be burglars that your home is occupied.

Are the Philips Hue Festavia string lights missing any features?

The Hue Festavia lights do lack a key feature compared to Twinkly, a competitor in the smart holiday string lights space: the ability to use your phone’s camera to map the position of each and every LED, which then allows you to “paint” your tree with static colors and eye-popping animations. 

It’s a nifty (if, at times, a tad tacky) feature, and for now, there’s no indication that Hue will follow suit with similar functionality for the Festavia lights.

Are the Philips Hue Festavia string lights worth the cash?

The Hue Festavia lights most of the boxes when it comes to smart lights, such as support for smart automations, compatibility with the three big smart home ecosystems, music syncing, and easy setup. If you’re already invested in the Philips Hue ecosystem and you want smart string lights that work with your other Hue products, the Hue Festavia lights make for an easy recommendation.

Still, some important caveats may be deal-breakers for some users, including the fact that the Hue Festavia lights aren’t suitable for outdoor use. Also, if you’re dead-set on intricate, coordinated animations that rely on LED mapping, or if you want to sync your string lights with music without a Spotify subscription or a Samsung Galaxy phone, then Twinkly’s line of smart string lights might be a better fit.