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The Luma Smartlamp lets you change colour, charge your phone, and listen to music

The Luma Smartlamp lets you change colour, charge your phone, and listen to music

By Gopal Sathe | Updated: 10 April 2014 13:04 IST

Every week, we're going to be checking out what's new on Kickstarter to find the most innovative and interesting new projects on the crowdfunding website. That's because in the last couple of years, some of the most exciting developments in technology have come, not from the established players but from small teams with big dreams, like the Pebble smartwatch and the Oculus Rift. We're watching out for what comes next.

Not all the ideas have to be huge game-changers though. Sometimes, the simplest ideas can be the most amazing. Take for instance, the Luma Smartlamp. Made by the same team that used Kickstarter to bring us PhoneSoap, the Luma is a pretty simple idea, but it's also very cool, and very reasonably priced.

The project is already fully funded, but there is still almost a month to go before it closes, so there's plenty of time to get yourself a Luma as well.

The Luma is a small bedside lamp with a USB port on the base, so you can charge your phone at night. The colour of the lamp's LED can be changed over Bluetooth with a companion app on your phone, through what looks like a very simple interface.

It also has a built in speaker with a wooden enclosure, and a microphone, with Bluetooth connectivity, so you can use it to listen to music in bed while you're reading at night, or as a morning alarm, and also as a speakerphone if someone calls when you're in bed.

And it also happens to be a pretty nice looking lamp, with two styles to choose from.

The lamp comes with a 2.1A USB charger, which means that you can even charge your iPad with it - the Luma needs to be plugged into a power cord of course.

An interesting feature of the built in speaker, meanwhile, is that if you buy a pair of Luma's (one for each side of the bed maybe) then you can use this for stereo sound, as the speakers can be linked. At the same time, the microphone means that you can use it to take calls without having to get out of bed.

The Kickstarter page says that the lamp comes with a wooden enclosure for the speaker, which is promising - the speaker has a 1.5" driver, which means it won't be incredibly loud but should be reasonable for a bedside speaker. The plans also include a 3.5mm auxiliary input, in case you don't want to use Bluetooth.

The most fun part is probably the lamp features - there's a proximity sensor so the lamp switches on automatically when you get close to it, and switches off when you leave the room. This feature can be disabled if you want, and you could just touch the lamp base to switch it on or off - the lamp's light is equivalent to a 60 watt bulb, but uses only 9 watts because of the LED being used. The LED whose colour can be adjusted from your phone. The default is a standard white light, but you can just use your iPhone or Android phone to adjust the intensity or hue.

There's more - the lamp can also flash and use the speakers to chime whenever you get notifications on your phone. According to the creators, it can interact with notifications from Gmail, Facebook and Instagram for now, and they are working on adding calls, voicemail and SMS next.

A short (10.25-inch) lamp is a reward for $89 backers, while a $110 backer can get a tall (18.5-inch) lamp. If they reach their first stretch goal of $100,000, then they will add 2 USB ports on the lamp, which sounds useful.

The Luma isn't a game-changer, but if you're looking for something that's fun and cool and won't annoy family members who don't love gadgets, then this is worth checking out.

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