obÌåÓý½Ó¿Ú

Of all the smart home devices available today, the various lighting options might just be my favourite.

How cool is it to have preset lighting scenes activate automatically when you walk in the room, or at a scheduled time, or at a spoken command?

Admittedly, my home is only partially lit by such technology. If I was really serious about it, I'd take the time to train the other members of my household in how all my smart lights work. That's just never going to happen. Mainly because some of those members aren't as excited about it as I am.

Anyway...

While it's certainly handy to have lights turn on by themselves when you need them to, I've found the smart lights I really like are lighting strips. The standout is the one I have on the back of my TV to project colours on the wall in sync with what I'm watching. But it's also fun to use lighting strips elsewhere - especially under shelves and behind furniture to create an ambient effect in the colour of your choice.

And now thanks to WiZ, there's nowhere I can't go...

WiZ gets no points for the way it names its light strips. Today I'm reviewing the Smart Flex Strip... although it's just called the Flex Strip 5m on the WiZ website. That's not to be confused with the LED Strip (which comes in various lengths) or the Neon Flex Strip (which looks similar but is shorter).

What the Smart Flex Strip gets maximum points for is - as its name suggests - flexibility. 

I've mucked around with a few light strips over the years and this one is easily the bendiest. That's because the designers seem to have taken a normal strip and put the lights along its edge, making the whole thing very thin and malleable.

If you haven't used them before, light strips come in several forms - some are quite literally just a line of LEDs stuck on a backing strip, often grouped into short sections, each of which may or may not be able to change colour in contrast to the section on each side.

Some strips like these treat each LED individually, creating what's known as a "gradient" effect - so dynamic, moving patterns become possible as one colour fades into another.

A further step up puts a cover over the LEDs so the whole strip then appears to be one long light, potentially still using its gradient abilities to create dynamic, moving patterns.

The WiZ Smart Flex Strip falls into this last category. The non-lit part of the strip is white and it comes with some very slim-line white mounting brackets which can either be screwed in or stuck to the wall with double-sided adhesive pads.

It's all very minimalist and subtle when not switched on and five metres is more than enough length to create some pretty cool shapes - in fact, you'll find a pamphlet full of suggested patterns in the box. 

However, rather than making a feature of the light strip itself, I decided to accessorise my desk. The generous five metres was more than enough for me to attach the Smart Flex Strip underneath the main work area, the back shelf and even behind my monitors. No screws were required; those 3M guys really know what they're doing when it comes to sticky stuff.

I have got a lot of random bits and bobs on my desk - all absolutely necessary of course. Normally, installing the amount of lighting I'm talking here would have involved me taking nearly everything off my desk to get to all the places I needed to go, assuming I had a light strip flexible enough to even be able to twist and turn that way.

Clearing my desk just wasn't necessary with the Smart Flex Strip. It's so narrow and bendy I was able to easily thread it through holes and between other devices with a minimum of desk disruption. I was stoked with the final effect, as you'll be able to tell from the video below.

The clever abilities of the Smart Flex Strip don't just stop at the ease of installation. You can control the it from the WiZ app, via your preferred voice assistant or perhaps most boringly, using the actual button on the control unit at the beginning of the strip. Although, that button only turns them on and off. In fact, when setting up using the WiZ app, you're supposed to be able to choose a colour or pattern that starts with a single click and a different one with a double click. I've tried this and it doesn't work. Some kind of firmware update will probably fix this eventually but in the meantime, WiZ also sells a remote control which might be handy if you have several WiZ devices to operate.

I prefer to use Alexa or Siri to turn my lights on and off - the Smart Flex Strip is Matter-enabled so that works well enough, although you can't access the more complicated themes and dynamic patterns without using the WiZ app.

Like other WiZ lights, you can set up automations to kick in at scheduled times and if you have more than one WiZ product in the same room, thanks to SpaceSense, they can also act as motion sensors, turning on when you walk in.

One of the weirder features is Music Sync. This lights up the Smart Flex Strip in time with your favourite playlists but there's a catch; there's no microphone built into the controller - it uses the mic in your phone instead, so that'll involve you leaving your handset next to a speaker, which seems like a bit of a faff to me.

The WiZ line of smart lighting is owned by Signify, the same outfit that produces Philips Hue devices. Don't be fooled though, there's no real compatibility between the two brands. So you can't control the WiZ Smart Flex Strip with the Philips Hue Play HDMI sync box for example. That said, WiZ has just launched its own version of the sync box - it's not as feature-packed but it is much, much cheaper.

Regardless, the Smart Flex Strip is perhaps the most versatile light strip I've used yet. Thanks to its super-slim profile and subtle mounting system, there's almost nowhere you can't install it, quickly and easily. Wherever you end up using it, it'll look great and there's no doubt it's created a vibrant, fun atmosphere around my cluttered desk.