Philips Hue's Festavia are the Christmas tree lights you've always wanted

Philips Hue Festavia
(Image credit: Signify)

Signify has today announced a new addition to its Philips Hue line of smart lights, and it'll look great wrapped around your Christmas tree.

The new Festavia string lights feature 250 mini smart LEDs spread along a 20m cable. You can, of course, use the lights wherever you like, but the most obvious use at this time of year is your tree. Otherwise, they'll look right at home pretty much anywhere.

Light it up

Like other Philips Hue lights, the Festavia string lights support Apple HomeKit, so they'll work fine with your Home automations and shortcuts. They'll also work with Siri, so you can bark orders and have your Christmas lights turn on or off or change color.

Speaking of colors, Signify says that more than 16 million of them are supported, and you can create a colorful effect — they don't all need to be the same color, making for some astonishing patterns.

Signify is also updating the Hue app to add a "new Sparkle effect makes each light on the string twinkle, creating an extra festive look." Another addition is Scattered, spreading "up to five colors randomly along the string for a colorful, festive experience."

If that sounds like something you want in your home, the new Philips Hue Festavia string lights go on sale on November 15 and will cost $160.

Oliver Haslam
Contributor

Oliver Haslam has written about Apple and the wider technology business for more than a decade with bylines on How-To Geek, PC Mag, iDownloadBlog, and many more. He has also been published in print for Macworld, including cover stories. At iMore, Oliver is involved in daily news coverage and, not being short of opinions, has been known to 'explain' those thoughts in more detail, too.

Having grown up using PCs and spending far too much money on graphics card and flashy RAM, Oliver switched to the Mac with a G5 iMac and hasn't looked back. Since then he's seen the growth of the smartphone world, backed by iPhone, and new product categories come and go. Current expertise includes iOS, macOS, streaming services, and pretty much anything that has a battery or plugs into a wall. Oliver also covers mobile gaming for iMore, with Apple Arcade a particular focus. He's been gaming since the Atari 2600 days and still struggles to comprehend the fact he can play console quality titles on his pocket computer.