ECOLOR Aurora review: Get groovy with this fun smart table lamp

ECOLOR's affordable smart lighting solutions are excellent gifts for children. The company makes smart light strips, table lamps, and even portable lights, all constructed with child-safe high quality plastic materials. The ECOLOR Aurora smart table lamp is one of the newest additions to the brand's smart lighting lineup.

Unlike the crescent moon-shaped ECOLOR Smart Table Lamp, the Aurora lamp features a more run-of-the-mill cylindrical form factor. In an effort to make the smart table lamp unique, ECOLOR added a glass-like ABS shade on top of the lamp, helping to diffuse the light in a softer manner. As you'd expect, there's a companion app with plenty of presets, loads of brightness levels, and touch controls.

There are also some welcome changes in the ECOLOR smart lamp this time around. You now get voice assistant support and a USB Type-C port — something ECOLOR hasn't done before. With the inclusion of these newer features, ECOLOR's Aurora Smart Table Lamp aims to compete with some of the best smart lamps in the market. Does it do a good job of it though? Let's find out.

Price and availability

The ECOLOR Aurora smart table lamp is available for purchase on Amazon. You can purchase one for about $69, fetching you the lamp itself along with a 6-foot long USB-C cable attached to a power adapter.

Despite what the propriety power cord and adapter included in the box suggests, you are free to use any decent USB-C cable and a 10W wall charger to power the ECOLOR lamp.

What I love

The ECOLOR Aurora smart lamp sports a heavy cylindrical body. A transparent shade made of ABS plastic encases the lamp itself. Thanks to its width, transparency, and durability, it is very hard to discern the shade from real glass. Overall, it looks spectacular and does a good job of dispersing light evenly. Compared to other ECOLOR lamps that I've tested in the past, the Aurora smart is by far the best lamp in terms of high-end looks and feel.

ECOLOR's latest creation manages to achieve impressively high levels of brightness. Of course, shades of white are much brighter than the other colors of the rainbow. Nonetheless, you won't be disappointed by the exuberance of the colorful hues either. Touch sensitive buttons on top of the smart table lamp can alter the brightness, turn the lamp on or off, and toggle various light modes such as the ambient music mode and other presets.

Of course, this iteration of ECOLOR smart lamps improves on its predecessors in a pivotal way. Finally, the Aurora smart lamp supports hands-free voice control integration, with a little help from Alexa and Google Assistant. You can ask your choice of smart assistant to turn the light on or off immediately, or schedule it for another point in time. Changing the color and brightness of the lamp is also possible, but you can't ask for specific presets when using voice controls.

I am really glad about the new changes implemented by ECOLOR. Take the USB-C port for instance. In a previous review, I expressed my disappointment about the micro-USB port found in the ECOLOR Smart Egg Lamp. It was an almost perfect portable smart light, held back by an outdated piece of hardware. Now that we are moving towards a world where USB-C is the standard port for most devices, it would be detrimental to continue adding the Type-C connector to newer products.

Equipped with its updated new features, ECOLOR Aurora is more than ready to take on the big players in the game. ECOLOR's quick and easy setup process, along with a surprisingly intuitive app, helps matters along very nicely. It may not look as fancy as the Govee app, but the ECOLOR Life app touts just as many options to tickle your fancy.

There are numerous modes to play around with that I'll get into in a bit. Let's talk about the other aspects before we go down that rabbit hole. You can use the app to manage all your other ECOLOR smart lights together. The app enables you to label your Aurora smart lamp, create schedules for it, turn it on or off, update the device firmware, view your previously used modes, and change light modes.

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The ECOLOR Life app has a few constant modes across all of its smart lighting products. The extensive music mode, segmented control, 16-million color wheel, the point-and-pick camera color picker, and around thirty or so preset "scenes" are all compatible with the Aurora lamp, as well as products like the ECOLOR Smart Strip Lights.

The ECOLOR Aurora touts even more comprehensive customizable options. You can set 10 different colors for each segment of the cylindrical lamp, and there is a dedicated night light section to manage the warmth and brightness of your basic white lamp function. In addition to that, there are two very creative modes called the drawing mode and the message mode. You can type out a 50-character message, choose its speed, text color, background shade, and even the brightness of the background under the message mode.

The drawing mode allows you to draw a pattern and choose its color, alter the background hue and brightness, set the speed and animation style, and even lets you name the sketch and save it. The "drawing" itself is easily made on a 13 by 10 pixel square. You can create anything you like by coloring in the pixels to make shapes and patterns. It's enough to entertain a full-grown adult for hours, let alone children with active imaginations.

What I don't like

I admire the strides that ECOLOR has taken to improve the Aurora smart table lamp as an excellent, yet affordable smart home accessory. That being said, there are a few kinks that need to be worked out. 

For starters, it would be nice if the newly added voice controls worked with the presets in the ECOLOR Life app as well. There are some gorgeous preset light modes in-app, and it's a shame that they aren't yet compatible with Alexa and Google Assistant.

Another point of improvement for ECOLOR is further improving the app. It looks a bit clunky, and I really hope that the brand invests some money into a UI/UX redesign. Apart from a superficial makeover, the app should really eliminate the need to have Bluetooth on at all times. Since the ECOLOR Aurora smart table lamps work on Wi-Fi, it is an unnecessary battery drain to have to have the Bluetooth on while using the app.

I end up using Google Assistant to fiddle with my ECOLOR Aurora lamp most of the time when my phone's Bluetooth is off. It is quite bothersome to turn it on, pop the app open, and then locate your desired mode or preset. I realize that I sound incredibly lazy, but this one's on my wish list nonetheless. Here's to hoping that a future app update fixes this.

As with any ECOLOR device, you can't choose a name longer than 10 characters for your ECOLOR Aurora smart lamp. Again, this is a seemingly pointless restriction to impose. Considering the fact that my name itself is 7 characters long, this poses a problem. If you have a long name like me, you can't name it "Namerah's bedroom lamp" or something convenient like I wanted to. This also helps Google or Alexa identify the Aurora lamp better if you have a ton of smart home gadgets hanging around.

Lastly, I would be remiss if I didn't mention the poor execution of the drawing and message modes. Sure, they're exceedingly good fun to poke around and have fun with. But the fact of the matter is, 9 out of 10 times, you can hardly make out the text or figures in the ECOLOR Aurora smart lamp. The shapes are really blurry and the borders sort of diffuse into the background.

Competition

Anyone who's familiar with the best smart bulbs, lamps, and lights of any fashion will know that the Govee Aura is the perfect alternative. Much like the ECOLOR Aurora smart table lamp, it is also shaped like an oblong cylinder and has touch controls on the top.

The Govee Aura lamp also has the text message and drawing modes, and all the same features such as voice assistant support. To the woes of the ECOLOR Aurora, the Govee Aura costs about $10 lesser to acquire. However, the ECOLOR lamp is much brighter than the Govee smart lamp.

Another suitable substitute would be the HUGOAI Smart Table Lamp, which is even cheaper than the Govee Aura. While the HUGOAI light is compatible with Alexa and Google Home, it lacks segmented control. Therefore, the HUGOAI Smart Table Lamp cannot display more than one color at a time.

Should you buy it?

You should buy this if...

• You need a bright and colorful smart table lamp
• You want voice assistant support and touch controls
• You're looking for extensive modes and segmented control
• You need an ambient music mode
• You want something with a solid build

You shouldn't buy this if...

• You want something portable
• You desire a really polished companion app

The ECOLOR Aurora left me with overwhelmingly positive feelings. The added improvements go to show that ECOLOR is actually listening to consumers' needs, which is something to appreciate. The Aurora smart table lamp has Alexa and Google Assistant integration and product quality is top notch, a step above regular plastic.

You don't just get an average smart light experience with an ambient mode and not much else. There's so much to do with the Aurora lamp, which makes it a great product. I argue that it looks better than the Govee Aura thanks to the ABS shade. Sure, there are some wrinkles to be ironed out still. But as a whole, you get phenomenal value. I can gladly recommend the ECOLOR Aurora lamp to anyone seeking a fun, groovy table lamp with smart features.