Misfit introduces a smart bulb to go with its sleep tracker

There’s no shortage of smart light bulbs on the market, but wearables company Misfit has decided that its influence shouldn’t stop with collecting health data. The company has just started taking pre-orders for the Misfit Bolt, a multicolored smart bulb that will work with its mobile apps. A forthcoming Misfit Home service will let users control their lights, but it will also have some compatibility with the existing Misfit app, which currently records physical activity, food intake, and sleep patterns. If you’re using one of its monitors, it can wait until you’re in a stage of light sleep and use the bulbs to “simulate a gentle sunrise.”

Misfit’s first product was the Shine, a style-focused fitness tracker that debuted last year. It followed that up with the aggressively priced Flash, another wrist-worn tracker, and the Beddit, a plastic strip that fits over your mattress to monitor your sleep. Like many other smart home products, the Bolt works best if you’re already invested in a larger ecosystem, but Misfit has a slightly mixed record — we found the Shine to be a little undercooked, but the Flash’s super-low cost is a notable selling point.

Misfit is going up against Philips, GE, Lifx, and other companies that have rolled out smart bulbs over the past few years. At $49.99 for a single 60W-equivalent Bolt or $129.99 for a set of three (there’s no central hub required to run them), it’s not the absolute cheapest smart lighting on the market if you’re alright with monochrome bulbs. Insteon’s white LEDs, for example, sell for around $30. But it handily undercuts the roughly $200 Philips Hue starter pack, as well as the company’s Wake-Up Light alarm clock. You’ll just have to decide if you’d rather try something new or stick with Philips’ pedigree.