After more than a month of sporadic outages that left many Sengled smart bulb users struggling to control their lights, Amazon has opted to pull the skill that allowed Sengled users to control their bulbs with Alexa. Some Sengled bulbs may still offer Alexa control directly via Zigbee, Matter, or Bluetooth connectivity, thus bypassing the yanked Alexa skill. But Sengled bulbs that can't be connected directly to Alexa will no longer be controllable via the voice assistant, Amazon said. Sengled lights and devices may still be controllable using the Sengled app or other smart home platforms, although the status of those connections still appears to be spotty. "We hold a high bar for the Alexa experience," an Amazon spokesperson told TechHive.

One of the best places to start when building a smart home ecosystem is smart lights. Not only are they relatively affordable compared to other IoT gadgets, often costing between $10 and $50 a bulb, but they can also completely change the feel of your home. You can go from boring and analogue to colorful and automated within minutes, and there are endless possibilities when it comes to creating funky-colored light scenes, setting schedules and more. But like the rest of the smart home space over the last few years, there are now more players in smart lighting than ever before. We tested out some of the most popular smart lights on the market and found that most of them are quite good, but there are differences in compatibility, color quality and mobile app usability that are worth considering before deciding which system will be right for your home.

From colour-shifting cars to digital art TVs and stress-predicting watches, the annual Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, which opened on Wednesday, offered its usual mix of wacky, visionary and desirable goods. Here are some of the highlights. The non fungible token, which confers ownership of a unique digital item such as a work of art, became a multi-billion dollar market in 2021 and Samsung announced a new TV feature that allows enthusiasts to browse, display and buy NFT-based art. Given how much some NFTs cost, you may not have much left over to pay for the screen. Nowatch has produced a smartwatch that monitors your cortisol levels to predict stress.

Among a series of CES 2022 smart home device announcements, has Sengled unveiled a health-monitoring light bulb. Yes, you read that correctly. Compared to the Smart Health Monitoring Light, all the best smart light bulbs look inane, simply turning on and off with an app or voice assistant. Sengled's bulb is far more sophisticated, promising sleep tracking along with select biometric measurement tracking. The question is, do I want my light bulb to know how well (or not) I snooze overnight?