After several leaks, Philips Hue has officially announced the Philips Hue Bridge Pro. Their current hub is the basis for their lighting products for years now, but also had it’s limits, mainly when looking at the number of products you can connect to it. With the Bridge Pro, Hue adds a new, more powerful 1.7 GHz chip with a quad-core Cortex-A35 CPU. It now supports more than 150 lamps, 50 accessories and up to 500 light scenes. The hub is available immediately and costs €89.99/£89,99/$98,99.
Philips Hue Bridge Pro
Most Philips Hue products work with Zigbee and Bluetooth. While you can locally control the lights via Bluetooth, Zigbee is required to control them anywhere in the world. This requires their own Zigbee hub, the Philips Hue Bridge. The bridge also works a a Matter hub, allowing you to control Hue devices in other Smart Home platforms like Apple HomeKit, Google Home and Home Assistant. For power users, there were some limits to this bridge, with the device limit as the most limiting one. Officially, the Hue Bridge can work with 50 devices, while in practice you could add a few more. More recently, Philips Hue updated their bridge to enable users to connect multiple bridges to each other. While this might already solve the problem, there seems to be room for a more powerful bridge. And indeed, Philips hue has now announced their new hub with the Philips Hue Bride Pro.
The current Bridge from Hue only worked via Ethernet, but this changes with the the Bridge Pro. You can now also connect the Bridge Pro to WiFi, which allows you to be more flexible with the placement of the Bridge Pro. However, generally it’s advised to still connect hubs like this to ethernet for better performance. With the upgraded chip, the Bridge Pro is now also significantly more powerful. This enables users to connect more devices and add more accessories and scenes. With 150 lamps, 50 accessories and 500 light scenes, the Philips Hue Bridge Pro seems to cover even the most powerful users. The build-in 8GB eMMC flash memory ensures enough capacity to support new features in the future. The Bridge Pro is powered by a USB-C cable.
MotionAware
There is also a new feature called MotionAware. This allows you to detect movement without needing a separate motion sensor. With at least 3 Hue devices, the Bridge is able to detect small differences in the radio signals in the room to determine motion. With MotionAware, you are able to automatically switch on the lights when you enter a room. Wiz already offers a similar future, and it will be interesting to see the reviews on this feature to determine if this could actually replace a motion sensor.
Availability and Price
The Philips Hue Bridge Pro is available immediately on the official Philips Hue website and Amazon. It costs €89.99/£89,99/$98,99, compared to €59.99/£49,99/$65,99 for the regular Bridge. The regular bridge will also still be available, and is probably still sufficient for most users. There are also several starter kits available.
Does the motion sensor feature work with HomeKit? If you have 3 or more Hue lights, can the motion sensor appear as a trigger to HomeKit automations? Do the bulbs need to be attached to the Hub Pro?
MotionAware is not visible in Apple HomeKit. It only works in the Hue app, so no information on motion detected by MotionAware in the Apple Home app, so also not triggers possible there.
The bulbs need to be connected to the Philips Hue Bridge Pro in order to set up MotionAware. This is not possible with the regular Hue Bridge. Probably because it needs a bit more power to process everything.