The Breaker Times

At IFA 2024, Govee revealed launch dates for a veritable rat king of Matter-enabled decorative lighting. These include smart string lights, curtain lights, and Govee’s first icicle-style smart lights. The company also has two sets of strip lights to follow up its M1 Matter strip, and… listen, it’s a lot of lights.

‘Tis (sort of, almost) the season, so let’s start with Govee’s new holiday lights. The company says all are IP65 waterproof-rated, so should be good for indoor or outdoor installation, and they’re all Matter-compatible, meaning you can use them with any smart home ecosystem that uses the one smart home standard to rule them all. All are coming to the US and the EU.

Coming first are the Govee Curtain Lights 2 on September 20th. Govee says these will be brighter than the previous version, and that custom effects such as user-provided animated GIFs or those picked from Govee’s library have been improved. They also sport Govee’s “AI Lighting Bot,” which lets you create effects by describing them either in text or with your voice. You will be able to pick them up in packs of one ($149.99), two ($259.99), or three ($399.99).

Govee is also releasing a follow-up to our last year’s pick for cheap smart holiday string lights. The company says its Christmas String Lights 2 use RGBW beads and come with a new “Smart Mapping” feature for setting up effects. They will start at $99.99 for a 20-meter string going up to $399.99 for 100 meters, and will be released September 25th.

Govee is also releasing new Icicle-style lights in 10-meter ($139.99) and 20-meter ($249.99) versions. These are a new style for the company, and will be available on September 29th.

Govee is also releasing two new strip lights, following the company’s M1 LED strip light that The Verge’s Jennifer Tuohy found to be bright, colorful, and broadly compatible, thanks to its Matter support. The new Strip Light 2 Pro and COB Strip Light Pro also work with the new smart home standard. The Strip Light 2 Pro uses RGBWW LEDs and gets a new chip that offers more color depth. It costs $59.99 for two-meter strips, $99.99 for five meters, and $149.99 for 10 meters.

The COB Strip Light Pro uses a chip-on-board LED design encased in silicon to diffuse the light, which ought to make light transitions along the strip smoother — more gradient, less obviously individual diodes. The COB Strip Light Pro will be $99.99 for three meters and $149.99 for a five-meter version. Both strip lights are out on September 10th.

Okay, so it’s not all string-shaped. Govee also announced its Star Light Projector (Aurora) and AI Sync Box 2. The $79.99 Aurora beams 16-million-color “customizable aurora effects” onto surfaces up to 650 square inches, and features a built-in Bluetooth speaker that’s also got 18 white noise sounds.

And finally, on October 14th, Govee will release the AI Sync Box Kit 2. This one is the latest ambient TV backlighting gadget that the company has been playing around with for a few years. (See our Govee Immersion review from 2021.) Announced at CES this year, the new Sync Box uses HDMI 2.1 passthrough to produce AI-generated effects for things like video games. It can pass up to 8K resolution at 60Hz or 4K at 120Hz — a step up from the 4K-limited HDMI 2.0 of the previous AI Sync Box Kit.