The best smart home integrations are the ones that disappear into your walls, ceilings, or the products you’d already own, and the best smart device executions are the simplest ones. Abide by both those tenets and marry them with great design and the Internet of Things is suddenly worth it.
The C by GE Sol is a lamp with full Alexa integration, and the best-looking product so far to boast that. While the Sol is totally suitable as a couch side or desk lamp, we lean toward a floor lamp for the former and clamp lamp for the latter, as those use cases really benefit from light you can direct.
Your nightstand is really where the Sol will... shine, with a light output up to 650 lumens that the Sol’s shape diffuses well, and the ability to dial down to a wonderfully warm 2000 K. The Sol has no audio out to connect it to a better speaker, but you’re much less likely to care about that for your nightstand speaker.
Rather than building an ugly digital clock that may or may not fully dim into the Sol’s base, GE gave the Sol an optional, minimalist time indicator inside the Sol’s ring, with red and blue lights representing hour and minute hands, and similar visual flair used by the timer function.
You can control the Sol with your voice or your phone, but that’s no excuse for capacitive buttons, which have yet to be implemented well on any product. In a perfect world, the Sol would be powered with a USB-C cable, have two USB-C outs, the base would be modular with clamp and pole accessories, and the top of the Sol’s base would be a wireless charging pad. What, we can dream can’t we?
I have a lot of products that make me happy on sight, but most of them aren’t smart. The GE Sol is among the best lamps, the best smart home efforts, and the best Alexa integrations so far.