Nanoleaf Smart Holiday String Lights review: Chestnuts roasting on an… open smart home platform

Christmas comes but once a year — yet your holiday decor need not be locked into one single look. With the new, affordable Nanoleaf Smart Holiday String Lights, you’ll be able to tune 20m of lights to any sparkling, twinkling, or flashing colored pattern that you want to see on your tree, with the ability to download hundreds of preset looks, make your own, and control them all with your voice or iPhone.

Happily HomeKit compatible thanks to integration with the fledgling, platform-agnostic Matter standard, they’ll bring festive cheer without the headaches sometimes associated with smart home lighting.

Nanoleaf Smart Holiday String Lights: Price and Availability

The Nanoleaf Smart Holiday String Lights are available now and cost $99 / £119.99. While that’s a lot for 20m of string lights (especially in the UK, where this Nanoleaf offering is more expensive), these are a huge cut above the quality of standard string lights, and offer premium features that dumb lights can’t. For reference, the Philips Hue Festavia are a similar product and cost more than twice as much.

Nanoleaf Smart Holiday String Lights: What I Loved

Having watched Chevy Chase struggle with his festive lights annually in Christmas Vacation, anything that makes getting the Christmas cheer up and running as quickly and simply as possible is welcome in the Lynch household. The Nanoleaf Smart Holiday String Lights thankfully are about as simple to set up as any smart home gear gets. 

Download the Nanoleaf iPhone app, scan a QR code on the instruction manual, follow the prompts to get the lights onto your Wi-Fi network (or connected to your handset’s Bluetooth signal) and away you go. In a few minutes, you’re ready to change the colors, twinkle settings, and more within the Nanoleaf app.

Whether you’re rocking a HomeKit smart home controlled by Siri, a Google Home set-up, or an Amazon Alexa system, it’s a piece of cake integrating the Nanoleaf Smart Holiday String Lights into your existing smart home. That’s because it’s built with the new(ish) platform-agnostic Matter standard at its heart, letting the lights communicate seamlessly with practically every smart home system worth its salt on the market. It’s great to see Matter starting to trickle down into more niche smart home devices.

Split across two strands, you’ve got a total of 20m of lights, totaling 250 programmable LEDs at intervals of 8cm. These end in a control box with a physical button that you can use to cycle through lighting settings if your connected devices aren’t immediately handy or you’re having connectivity issues.

You’ll have a lot of fun with Nanoleaf’s lights. Fire up the app and you’ll see the string lights have a handful of presets installed, ranging from simple all-white twinkles to fireplace-like crackles or 80s-style blasts of color waves. But that’s the tip of the iceberg — Nanoleaf lets you choose from hundreds of user-generated lighting patterns to download directly to the lights, some made by Nanoleaf’s own team but many more just from smart home enthusiasts. These can range from soothing meditation patterns to lights that sync up to music heard on your phone’s microphone, and even some themed lights to match a film or game’s prominent color schemes — I had a good laugh making my tree look like the retro green computer text from The Matrix, for instance.

If the community download options aren’t your thing, you’ve all the same tools in the app to create and save your own patterns, too. There’s a toolset here to achieve some quite complicated stuff, and those looking for a very specific lighting action could spend hours fine-tuning to their exact specifications.

The lights themselves look wonderful. There’s a far wider range of colors that they can hit than standard string lights, with 16 million color shades available, and 250 lumens peak brightness, dimmable through the app. Available to include in your standard smart home schedules, they’ll also work outside, with an IP44 rating protecting them from a bit of snow and rainfall, if not a full-on deluge, and operational between temperatures of -15c and 40c. You’ll still need to keep the standard plug and control box inside though.

Nanoleaf Smart Holiday String Lights: What I Didn’t Love

There’s not too much to fault with the Nanoleaf Smart Holiday String Lights, but a few improvements could be made all the same.

The key one is connectivity. Though the Nanoleaf Smart Holiday String Lights can talk to your smart home via Bluetooth and Wi-Fi, you’ll need that Wi-Fi connection to download or preview new lighting patterns. In my testing, the Bluetooth remained stable throughout, but Wi-Fi could be a bit hit or miss, making some voice-activated commands from Alexa or HomeKit fail — not to mention preventing you from immediately accessing the hundreds of different styles available to you.

Secondly, there’s not much in the way of cable management here. The 20m length is split into two separate 10m cords, which might help when packing up (even if it’s a bit odd when it comes to twirling them around your tree). But a spool to collect all the lights in might be longed for when it comes to untangling these in a year or so’s time.

A final smaller issue is that the black cabling that connects each LED is quite thick and a bit unsightly unless you’re particularly skilled at weaving it among the branches of your tree. In fairness, it’s no worse than you get with traditional string lights. But perhaps a clear cable option would be easier on the eye? It certainly will limit where you’d want to hang these lights once the festive season is over, should you intend to keep them up once the gifts have been unwrapped.

Nanoleaf Smart Holiday String Lights: Competition

Philips Hue Festavia is the key competition here when it comes to string lights specifically tuned for holiday decorations. They’ve a few different features that Nanoleaf’s alternative doesn’t offer — a more sophisticated music awareness mode and intricate light-movement patterns — and have similarly wide smart home compatibility.

But! They cost about twice as much as the Nanoleaf option at $219, and don’t have quite the intricate level of customization options and user-generated lighting styles as the Nanoleaf option, making Nanoleaf the pack we’d pick.

Should You Buy the Nanoleaf Smart Holiday String Lights?

Buy the Nanoleaf Smart Holiday String Lights if...

• You want full customization control over your festive decorations
• You don’t want to push the boat too far when it comes to price
• You’re already invested in a smart home ecosystem

Don't buy the Nanoleaf Smart Holiday String Lights if...

• You don’t care about smart features
• You’re still waiting to see how the Matter ecosystem plays out
• The Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come hasn’t visited you yet, Scrooge!

Nanoleaf Smart Holiday String Lights: Verdict

If you’ve been a good girl or boy all year round, you could do much worse than asking Santa to pick up the Nanoleaf Smart Holiday String Lights for you this Christmas. They offer a ton of customization options, won’t break the bank at a pricey time of year, and look great wherever you decide to hang them. An excellent addition to the best HomeKit lights out there, I’m in fact thinking of finding them a permanent place around my home, all year long.