Joining the illuminati? Just how bright can a smart bulb really be?

The bulbs themselves

It is worth highlighting how the bulbs themselves are put together. They are basically high-quality LED bulbs with a hole in the middle into which BeON's proprietary modules fit.

The company only has one module at launch but it is working on new ones with new features such as bulbs with speakers (to, say, mimic the sounds of a dog or possibly stream your voice), or with motion detection (the Welcome Home feature without having to get out your phone).

They are low-power LED lights so don't use much electricity and they put out 800 lumens of light (basically a 60W bulb) with a temperature of 3,000 Kelvin (basically soft warm white light). They work in most situations and are comfortable.

They are also the same size as your normal lightbulb and have the same common fitting as the most common screw-in lightbulb. You could easily mistake them for a normal bulb except for the fact they are heavier and have a big yellow blob in the middle. In short, the form factor is exactly right to be installed extremely easily in your house.

And now the downsides

Of course nothing it perfect. And the BeON system has a number of downsides.

For one, it works using Bluetooth. So everything works fine while you are in your house or just outside. But as soon as you are a small distance away, you are disconnected from the service.

The company makes the obvious case that this means the system is harder to hack into; it's not going out onto the internet. But at the same time, if you drive off for that long weekend and only remember to turn the security lighting system on five minutes up the road, you are going to have to turn back.

This also has an impact on the usefulness of the Welcome Home service – there is a delay of a few seconds when you open the BeON app while it connects to the bulbs. Only then can you turn on the lights.

There is also the fact that BeON can't know how your house is laid out and so it can't design for every possible use. We found in testing that we wanted a light outside the front door. But there isn't a screw-bulb light fitting out there, just an electrical box into which a security light is installed.

Another great location had the more narrow screw thread fitting so couldn't be used. And yet another great location had an in-built dimmer, and the BeON did not like that at all. No dimmer switches for these products. Likewise, if you have a covered fixture like a glass bowl over your existing lightbulb; that will be an issue both on sound and signal.

This inability to use the best position was frustrating and limited the system's use. Without those features working optimally, $199 suddenly looks like a lot of money for three LED bulbs.

Of course that is just one house setup, but it does demonstrate that you would need to think about whether this system would work for you. That said, there was a serious discussion in our household about replacing the fixtures in order to get these benefits; the security light outside is too bright anyway.

The system can also be overwhelmed by multiple users and with multiple commands. If one person wants to put the lights on, and another wants to turn on the security setting, the bulbs get very confused. Likewise, if you hit one setting and then realise you actually want a different one, the bulbs become paralysed and just stay on, staring at you. In that case, you have to turn them on and off again at the switch to effectively hit reset.

It didn't happen often and we were testing them out, but it is enough of an issue that the company says it is working on a multi-user feature.

Another issue is that three bulbs is probably not enough if you really want the true benefits of the system. Well, unless you have a studio flat in which case you'll be fine. But if you have a two or three bedroom house or apartment, you'll ideally want four or five bulbs. With each new bulb costing $75, you are looking at $350 for a system from a company that you can't be 100 per cent sure will be around in a few years time.

That said, there is no getting away from the fact that the design, the manufacturing, the software and the overall functioning of the BeON system is impressive. It doesn't feel like a launch product; it feels like the second or even third generation.

There is room for improvement. It is working on a cloud option to store your lighting patterns so they don't vanish if you lose your phone. It plans on bringing out new modules early next year so the system will feel broader and more expansive.

The company is also working on a service it is calling Evolve that will be a sort of service plan subscription that will give you access to all its new features and send a new bulb once a year so you can grow your system over time. It will likely cost $10 a month.