The Philips Hue Tap Dial Switch, priced at $49.99, is a smart lighting control for the Hue superuser. It’s the most powerful and innovative Hue accessory so far, with four buttons and a physical dial for dimming. The buttons and dial are tied directly to a room or zone in the box, making it look like a Hue Smart Dimmer Switch. This can control all Hue lights in your house, so why limit yourself to one room?
The Tap Dial is a wireless smart switch that charges with a battery. It can turn on and off Philips Hue lights, dim them, or set up lighting scenes. It comes with a magnetic base that can be attached to the included wall plate or placed on any flat or metallic surface for remote control.
It’s part of Hue’s smart lighting ecosystem, which works with Apple HomeKit, Amazon Alexa, Google Home, and Samsung SmartThings. Signify (owners Hue) also confirmed to The VergeThe new smart home standard Matter will be compatible with the switch. This means that it may be able to control more than just Hue lights.
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The Tap Dial is heavy, weighing in at just over two and a quarter ounces (an inch more than the Apple TV remote). But that weight is to its advantage; you can turn the dial while it’s sitting on the table, and it won’t slide around. The dial has a solid feel and gives you haptic feedback. It’s a lot like rotating a Nest Learning Thermostat, and it’s only a smidge smaller than that. It worked quickly and reliably. The dimming operation was smooth and responsive with no noticeable lag.
Out of the box, it’s set up to dim whichever lights, room, or zone you pair it with in the Hue app. The buttons one through three adjust the brightness, while the fourth cycles through five Hue scenes. The dial provides more precise dimming. A long press on any button will turn off the lights. (Hue scenes can be different combinations of brightness and color temperature depending on the type of bulbs.
But there’s no real reason to buy the Tap Dial if you’re just going to control a single room or zone. That’s what the Hue Dimmer Switch does well at about half the price. The Tap Dial works as a multizone controller, making it ideal for users with many Hue lights.
The Tap Dial was installed in my entry hall. Each button controlled a different area of my house. Button 1 turned on all Hue lights in my house. Button 2 controlled the living room and entry hall, while button 3 controlled the upstairs lights. And button 4 controlled the downstairs lights. I also added some colorful scenes for subsequent button presses (you can press each button up to 10 times to cycle through additional scenes) but didn’t find myself using them often.
I set the dial so that all lights are controlled at once. The Tap Dial can only control one light at a time. AllLights, or one room or zone. I’d like it to dim or brighten the lights for whichever button you just pressed. The slightly clunky workaround here is to use the second and third presses on each button to dim the lights that aren’t controlled by the dial.
I have a central lighting control that allows me to access all the lights in my home without having to use a phone or speak commands. This makes this gadget very useful. This would be a must-have purchase if my home was fully equipped with Hue lights. It isn’t, though, and until this can effectively control every smart light in my home, regardless of brand (which it may be able to do when Matter gets here), this makes it more of a nice-to-have than a must-have for me.
The other issue is that even with what I thought was an intuitive setup, it’s not easy to remember which button does what, and I’d like the option to label them with a little icon or emoji.
This physical controller can be used to manage all Hue bulbs and light fixtures in your home. You can program it to control outdoor Hue lighting. At $50, it’s an expensive piece of kit, plus it uses Zigbee, so you have to have a Hue Bridge ($59.99), but there aren’t many good solutions for dimming smart bulbs.
Smart dimmer switches will only work with standard bulbs. There are two options for Hue bulbs: you can ask a voice assistant for setting the lights to 70 percent, or use a smartphone app to do it. You can also press and hold a button on Hue Dimmer Switch ($28) and twist the rotating dial on Lutron Aurora ($40). This is a retrofit option that works with toggle switches. I’ve tried all these, and the Tap Dial is definitely the nicest to use.
If you only have a few Hue bulbs, you’ll be better off with the cheaper Hue Smart Dimmer, which can do everything this device does, just with less individual room control and with a clunkier interface for dimming.
The Smart Dimmer also has the option of time-based lighting — where the lights turn on at a certain brightness based on the time of day — a great feature that, oddly, is not yet offered on the Tap Dial. Kelly Hrank from Signify’s PR team told me that the feature would be coming soon. Hrank also stated that the switch is not available in the Hue Labs feature on the Hue app. This allows you to set up more powerful lighting scenes.
Like the earlier now discontinued Hue Tap, the Tap Dial can be used as a HomeKit scene controller, but right now, you shouldn’t bother. The dial doesn’t work in HomeKit (which is a limitation of Apple’s, not Hue’s), and you can only use a single press to trigger Automations. This $50 dial switch is less useful than the Wemo Stage I reviewed, which was specifically designed for HomeKit and ran HomeKit Automations faster than the Tap Dial.
Soon, the Tap Dial’s features will increase. The option to “Configure in HomeKit” has been available for Hue accessories for years, but the Hue app now contains an option to configure the Tap Dial in another app — the Tap Dial is the first Hue accessory to support this. The option doesn’t do anything yet, but Hrank told The Verge Amazon Alexa will be one of the apps that you can set up the Tap Dial.
This Should mean you’ll be able to use the Tap Dial to control any Alexa-compatible smart device (not just Hue, and not just lights), as is the case if you use it in HomeKit. The dial can be exposed to Alexa and would be a very useful lighting control, especially if it could trigger Routines. I’ll test this as soon as it is available and report back.
All this openness is likely part of the preparation for Matter, a unique feature of which is multi-admin control — the option to set devices up to be controlled by any Matter-compatible ecosystem. With Matter-support, the Tap Dial could be used to control every light in my house no matter who made them — a much better proposition than being locked into Hue’s expensive ecosystem.
But don’t buy the Tap Dial now for what it might be able to do later. If you have Hue light fixtures throughout your home, and want to be in control of them all from one device (with a physical dimmer), the Tap Dial is for you!The Tap Dial can be useful right now. For anyone else, wait and see what’s coming.
Photos by Jennifer Pattison Tuohy/The verge
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