Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

I am a Kickstarter backer but I ended up buying my bulbs at retail and got them quicker. I've had the Philips Hue bulbs for about a year, as well as various import LED bulbs I've bought on Amazon. I'm also an electronics engineer by trade so know a little about the technology. This review is more in comparison to the big competitor to Lifx - the Philips Hue. First, the good. The good part of the Lifx bulb is that it is bright on white mode, and it can produce deep colors, especially green and yellow, whereas the Hue does not go as green or as yellow due to the different type of LED's the Hue uses. Now, the bad... and unfortunately there is quite a lot of bad. First, the bulb is huge. Significantly larger than a standard bulb and any other LED bulb I own - to the point where it does not fit into most light fixtures. I don't want to change many of my light fixtures for a bulb, so this renders the Lifx very limited in application. Second, this thing runs HOT. Very very hot. It reached almost boiling point in an open shade fixture. I don't believe this bulb will last long at those temperatures. And due to the temperature, the manufacturer says you cannot use this bulb in an enclosed fixture - further limiting it's use. Third, the quality of the white light is not good. The CRI (color rendering index) of this bulb is significantly lower than the Hue. This means that colors often look "fake"... oranges can look red, or yellows look pale or green-ish. You can see the reason for this when dimming the bulb... it uses neutral white LED's and just adds in green and red to make it warmer, and adds in blue to make it cooler. But this is not how true warm and cool colors are made - because it misses the yellows, oranges and lime greens of a true warm light. So comparing the Lifx bulb on warm setting to a normal Cree high-CRI warm LED bulb, the Cree bulb looks golden, glowing, warm.... the Lifx looks greenish.. .it's just a strange and unnatural effect. That is my biggest gripe with this bulb... the Philips Hue produces very nice high quality light that I find great for reading, working, cooking, studying, etc. The Lifx has a strange unnatural looking light that I just find hard to ignore... I found myself turning it off and going with my other LED bulbs. Considering the additional cost of this bulb over the Hue, I could not recommend it. The other problem is the software. Most of the things it says on the box, the bulb won't do. I couldn't get these bulbs working with Android, and I had to use the iOS app, which is much more polished. Unfortunately I was planning to get rid of my iOS devices so I don't want to have to keep it just to make a light bulb work. So in summary, Lifx has brightness and good colored (red, green, blue) light. But it is too big, runs hot, is too expensive, and produces bad quality white light.