Eve Flare short review: The smart home lamp that creates good mood lighting but can’t light a whole room

The Eve Flare is the smart home manufacturer Eve Systems’ first mood light suited for the thread network. When you first unpack it, the lamp immediately surprises you with its size. With a diameter of 25 centimetres, the Eve Flare is actually even bigger than a size-7 basketball.

In the adverts, its size doesn’t entirely come across well, as Eve Systems often uses an iPhone as a size comparison, whose size can’t be accurately determined at first glance. This means this lamp isn’t suited for bringing with you on your travels.

Within your apartment, however, the lamp can be easily manoeuvred. It even features a handle on the bottom which lets you hang the lamp upside down. Thanks to its integrated battery, you can easily use the Eve Flare throughout the entire evening.

Eve Home has listed the device as having a battery life of 6+ hours, which is under-exaggerated, to say the least. During our tests, we measured a minimum of eight hours. Plus, it should be noted that we even used the power-hungry warm white mode for these measurements.

It turns out that its runtimes are highly dependent on which color you have selected – as we measured in our power tests with a fully-charged battery. The worst case scenario is if you select the warm white color. You can only make estimations on the app, as it doesn’t display the Kelvin values. Set accordingly, the light draws around 2 watts from the mains at maximum brightness. Mind you, this already amounts to 8 hours. The value drops to 0.3 watts when using the minimum brightness. 

On the other hand, using a cool white reduces its power consumption. So, if you like this type of vibe, then you can expect slightly longer runtimes, as its power consumption sinks to 1.4 watts. Blue and red also both lie within this area.

Green is particularly frugal. Here, we measured a maximum of 1 watt. Using the minimum brightness, this value sinks to 0.2 watts.

These are good battery life results. Officially, the lamp’s battery capacity isn’t indicated. Upon requesting this information, Eve told us that it has a 1,800 mAh battery installed. With a voltage of 3.7 volts, this results in just under seven watt-hours. Interesting: Its brightness barely decreases noticeably toward the end of its battery runtime. You only notice this when you put Eve Flare back on its dock for charging – then the globe becomes brighter again. The reason for this is its decreasing voltage, as stated by Eve Systems.

The sphere can be charged via a simple docking station which has a circular charging surface. It looks a bit cheap and is also too light if the cable to the power supply is not routed out properly. Too bad. We would have preferred a docking station with USB Type-C for the Eve Flare. Especially since no more than 5 watts are drawn from the socket while it is charging, anyway. There is no need for a power adapter.

Upon requesting, Eve Systems additionally told Notebookcheck.com that the battery can quite easily be swapped out for aftermarket batteries. Unfortunately, by doing so, you will ruin the case’s water-resistant effect (IP65 rating).

Very intense colors 

The lamp’s color depiction is great at all times thanks to its diffusing sphere. The colors always appear very balanced. Shadows can’t be identified with the naked eye. The sphere appears to have a uniformly-lit surface. Even its seam (the Eve Flare consists of two halves) can generally not be noticed. You would have to shine a secondary light source onto the joint in order to properly see it.

The colors themselves actually often feel a little exaggerated. The pink (named Cherry) almost appears as a penetrating Telekom-style purple. The same can be said for the colors red, green, blue and quite a few transitional tones. Almost every color looks good. We only struggled to achieve a clean-looking yellow. The Eve Flare struggles a little with white colors, although this isn’t necessarily noticeable. 

In general, we would recommend keeping the lamp’s brightness above 50 per cent. Anything below this means the colors don’t look as intense anymore. Cool white light actually ends up looking like a mix of blue and purple if you turn down the brightness a lot. Updating the firmware from 2.1.1 to 2.1.3 didn’t change anything about this.

The background for this is is a few compromises which had to be made by Eve. The distribution of the LEDs is also interesting, which the company told us when asked. 14 white, 23 red, 7 green and 15 blue LEDs are responsible for the color mix.

Displaying the colors on the app can be a little bit of an issue. On the iPhone 12 Mini’s OLED display, the colors look a bit different. For example, this can be said for Cherry, the extremely vivid pink. On the iPhone, this doesn’t come across at all. The same can be said for Scarlet, which is supposed to be a red – but it appears as more of an orange tone. If you are looking for specific colors, then you are better off choosing these within the offered color space. We would love to have seen pre-set colors or something like an RGB switcher.

As a result, its app certainly isn’t perfect and leaves us wishing for a little more. Just like on other smart home devices, the Eve Flare can also be connected to other components in order to enable joint control. For example, this could be used to set the mood lighting together with the evening lighting.

There are two rubberized buttons with a clearly defined pressure point on the bottom. However, they have to be pressed somewhat firmly, which prevents operating errors. One switches the light on, the other changes between the colors.

Slow reactions

We do have one major critique point. The Eve Flare reacts at a leisurely pace. On the one hand, it gently raises the brightness, which is nice. On the other hand however, the sphere doesn’t react immediately when you select a color on the app. In certain cases, this can take well over a second. When asked, Eve Home explained this behavior. The Eve Flare only wakes up every 5,000 ms in battery use. When connected to the dock, this is reduced to every 2,000 ms.

This behavior is especially annoying when you are using Eve Flare within a group. While the Philips Hue lights react pretty much immediately, you can watch Eve Flare trail behind. Even compared to other Eve products, the Eve Flare is slow.  

We also experimented with the settings. Switching to quick mode only changes the way in which the lamp gets lighter when it is switched on. This doesn’t change anything about its slow reaction speeds. The 2.1.3 firmware update also made no difference to this.   

But this is more a detail problem. After all, it is only limited to switching on and off.  

Eve Flare currently only works with Apple operating systems, as it is a threaded/home kit light. As a Minimal Thread Device, it also acts as an endpoint on the network and cannot be used as a repeater.  

A Matter upgrade is still to follow. However, it is unclear when Eve Flare can then be used with Amazon’s Alexa or Google Home. Eve Home did not want to comment on this when asked.

Pros

 +  IP65-certified water-resistant case
 +  long runtimes
 +  very even lighting
 +  very intense colors

Cons

 –  sometimes quite long reaction speeds
 –  color stability is not always guaranteed in darker settings
 –  Matter update still to come
 –  the docking station is too light