Ann: Update to LIFX Acquisition Financing Arrangements, page-92

LIFX Tile will light up your life with fun andgames

By John Davidson

July 25 (Financial Review) -- Welcome to anotherepisode of our occasional series Happy Home Maintenance, an advice column forpeople who either don't own a home or own one that is already shipshape and sofeel they are missing out on the happiness that comes with having things tomaintain.

Regular readers of this irregular column will knowthat achieving a state of Happy Home Maintenance is a six-step process:

Step 1Find something that works reliably and willgo on working reliably long after you're dead, such as a simple power switch.

Step 2Replace it with a high-tech gadget whichmostly works, such as a remote-controlled power switch.

Step 3Put that new gadget on a wireless network,such as your home Wi-Fi network, which mostly works.

Step 4Attach it to the internet, preferably via theNBN, which mostly works.

Step 5Control it with a voice-powered artificialintelligence, such as Google Assistant, Amazon Alexa or Siri, which mostlydon't work.

Step 6Wait for the laws of probability to takeeffect.

Which brings us to the topic of this week'sepisode, the Tile by Australian gadget company LIFX.

This amazing device isn't a one-for-one replacementof anything in your home. In fact, there is nothing quite like it, apart fromthe Nanoleaf Canvas which we reviewed last year, but it does allow you toachieve Step 1 in the broad sense (as you will see, you can use it to replacelight globes), and it does allow you to achieve Step 2, 3, 4 and 5 very nicely,thank you very much.

Like the Nanoleaf Canvas, the LIFX Tile is a Wi-Fi(perfect!), internet (perfect!) and voice-AI powered (perfect!) lighting systemthat is so much more than mere illumination.

It can be used to light your house, yes, but it canalso be used as an ever-changing lighting feature in your home - one you stickon the wall with double-sized adhesive tape and use to paint colour and lightaccording to your mood, your decor or, in the spirit of Happy Home Maintenance,whatever brightness and colour the Tile was set to last, before the controlsstopped working.

The system is made up of a set of 20 cm x 20 cmlighting panels each containing a grid of 8 x 8 LEDs that can light up inpretty well any colour you choose. Which means each tile can be 64 colours atonce (unlike the Nanoleaf Canvas, which has smaller, far less bright panelsthat can be only one colour at a time). This allows you to create complexdesigns that stretch across the set.

And where you clip the Nanoleaf Canvas panelstogether, the panels in the LIFX Tile have to be joined with wires. This isboth very good and very bad.

It's good because the wires make for a much moreflexible setup. The tiles don't need to be aligned with each other to jointogether, so you have vastly more ways to configure them. Indeed, they don'teven need to be touching, so you can spread them out over a much greater area,if you like.

It's bad because the wires are an absolute pain toget right, especially if you do want the panels touching each other. Each wireis way too long to merely join two panels together without it poking out. Butto get the wires to the right length you have to wind them though a trickyseries of channels before you go to stick the panels on the wall, and then hopeto god they don't pop out before you're done.

On the plus side, making things more difficult thanthey used to be is the core principal of Happy Home Maintenance, and designingand mounting your very own LIFX Tile setup is guaranteed to give you hours ofjoy.

Physically setting them up is only a fraction ofthe fun, of course. You then have to attach them to your Wi-Fi network(perfect!) so you can control them from the LIFX app on your phone, which letsyou turn them on or off, and select their colours or brightness.

If you're planning to use the Tiles only as asource of illumination - say, as a big lighting panel mounted above a kitchenbench, that's all you need to do with the app. It's not at all a bad use forthe LIFX Tile, by the way. It's much brighter than the Nanoleaf Canvas, so itmakes a better light source. But it's worth noting that each panel is muchthicker than a Nanoleaf tile (33.5 mm versus 11 mm, counting the adhesive) sothe Canvas may be a better choice if you're planning to recess the light.

Of course, there are cheaper and easier ways tocreate a large, flat light panel so, unless you're a true devotee of Happy HomeMaintenance, you really want to do more with the LIFX Tile.

You can paint patterns on the app screen with yourfinger, for instance, and they'll appear on the panels moments later. It's notas granular as we had hoped (each LED is too diffused to let you write yourname across the panels, for instance) and it's not always entirely accurate.But with enough practice and artistic talent you could probably create somenice designs.

Easier to use, perhaps with some applied effects,are the very nice themes that come with the app, such as "Love","Mellow", "Exciting" or "Warming". If you choosethe "Morph" effect and then apply the "Soothing" theme, itwill cause pastel pinks, oranges and blues to swirl slowly across your tiles,kind of like an old-fashioned lava lamp only up on your wall.

But of course it's nothing like an old-fashionedanything, we soon found. The app kept unexpectedly jumping out of the settingssection while we were halfway through a new design or even before we'd startedone - leaving us stuck with the old Tile colours and patterns until the appdecided to settle down long enough to let us control things again.

And once you add voice control, you're in for awhole new level of fun (by which I mean "unreliability"). GoogleAssistant, in particular, was very fun. We could often turn the panels on oroff simply by saying, "Hey Google, turn on the Tile." (Because,really, who wants to pull out a phone and fire up an app just to turn on thelights?) But almost as often Google would inform us, "It looks like theTile isn't available right now."

Is that Google's fault? Is it a problem with theLIFX Tile? Is it the Wi-Fi? Is it the NBN? Any one of those could cause thelights to stop working, making it almost impossible to diagnose and fix.

But that's not to say it's not worth trying to fix.Happy Home Maintenance!

LIFX TileLikes Bright, deep colours in endlessvarietyDislikes App doesn't always work. Voice works even lessPrice $400 forpack of five