Govee Glide RGB Light Review: A Legit third Brand

POSITIVES

✓ Good App Customization

Can adjust a lot things

✓ Smart Home Ready

Has Alexa and Google Assistant to help it work

✓ Solid Lighting

Good brightness and color saturation for RGB light

NEGATIVES

✘ Limited Formations

Can only shape so many layouts

✘ Occasional Renegade

Ignores smart home group commands sometimes

Purchase Price: $99.99

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If you’ve been a fan of RGB wall lights, you’re probably familiar with the brands LIFX and Nanoleaf. I’ve had products from those two companies on the walls of my rooms for many years now, but a different company that has recently been popping up everywhere are products made by Govee. If you scour Amazon, you’ve probably come across their wide range of products on digital display. I’ve actually had Govee lights on my walls for a couple of years now and they’re surprisingly competent in this RGB accent lighting field. One product that stands out to me is their Govee Glide wall light. This has been on my wall here in the home office for more than a year now and I think it’s a terrific time to revisit it in this full review.

What is the Glide?

The Govee Glide consists of 6 individual ABS plastic light tubes (7 including the corner piece), that snap together to form a design on your wall. Govee says this particular product can display up to 57 colors at one time and 16 million colors total. There’s no way I’m going to measure every inch of the hue or the color wheel, but I can say that there are a lot of potential customization opportunities with the Glide. This starter pack I purchased is the lowest configuration available. If you want to build a more sophisticated look with more pieces, Govee does sell an additional two pieces for $150 that also includes 4 corner pieces instead of one. Since these are modular pieces, you can buy more pieces later and continue to snap them onto your wall design to extend the look. Much like LIFX and Nanoleaf products, the procedure to put these pieces together is quite simple. You lay out the format you want to make and then double side tape them to the wall. The pieces have a connector on either one end or both ends. One piece will also lead to the power cable that goes into a wall outlet. They snap into place smoothly and hold their form rather stably even before mounting them with tape.

Light It Up

For a product that solely focuses on pleasing the eyes, the Glide relies heavily on its smart guts. Tied to the Govee Home app, the Glide can be controlled down to the mynute detail. You can decide when and where a color hits a panel. You can mix and match different hues until it has the correct gradient to match the mood you want to set. There’s also preset modes of lighting effects and colors that match a specific scenario you may be looking for. If none of these match the pattern of lights you want to display, you can even design your own unique color scheme and lighting pattern. Another mode that works with the Glide is to have it react to sound. This music mode is great for parties when you’re blasting music with family and friends. The app UI is pretty basic, but it’s been consistent whenever I open it to control the Glide. I actually have not come across any connectivity issues in the last 12 months. I can’t say the same about both Nanoleaf and LIFX. While I do like the two company’s app designs better than Govee’s app, both of those companies have left me with headaches wondering why my products would randomly disappear from the app. 

A good smart light wouldn’t be smart if it didn’t link up with the user’s smart home systems. Govee’s system is compatible with Alexa and Google Assistant to control the Glide. I use Alexa to not only turn on the lights, but to toggle between the moods I want to display. So while the app is useful, if you have a well integrated smart home setup, you wouldn’t really ever even need to open the app to have full control of the Glide. On occasion, the Glide does go renegade from the rest of the grouped room and refuses to turn off or on. This happens for every product I’ve come across and usually is fixed by a second command or a hard reset.

Endless Creativity?

I would love to one day surround wall mounted display shelves with figures and collectibles with Glides that can then be highlighted with certain colors and patterns I set for different occasions.

Govee advertises the Glide to have endless creative designs as long as you have the mind to do it. That technically might be true on the color spectrum as you can have certain hues in combinations of spots other people may not have done before. Structurally though, you really only have a certain amount of layouts the Glide can preside in. Let’s say you have a 6 set with 1 corner piece like I do. You can either make an arrow pointing up, a straight line, or a line that bends 90° left or right. You can also make a decision on how soon the angle hits the line. That’s really about it. In my case, I made a reverse L-shape and hung an acrylic painting created by our very own, Seri, underneath. It kind of looks like a house for sale sign, but I do like the unique presentation it has accenting the wall. The colors that I choose to display can also accent the painting. If you think about how to use the Glide in this manner, then there are plenty of creative ways to utilize the RGB lighting. I would love to one day surround wall mounted display shelves with figures and collectibles with Glides that can then be highlighted with certain colors and patterns I set for different occasions. This changes the way collectors like me can display things in our rooms.

I do think that the Govee Glide offers terrific value at $100. The amount of real estate it covers on the wall is decent for the price, as well as the actual brightness of the RGB. To the naked eye, it blends seamlessly next to my much costlier Nanoleaf and LIFX products. Whether it’s a standalone or an accent piece on a wall, there’s enough here from Govee to be competitive with the other big players in this field. After this positive experience with the Glide, I’m more inclined to give the different shapes a try instead of adding onto the ever growing expensive Nanoleaf setups. 

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