Neat idea. What do we do with it?

A remote-control LED lightbulb is a fantastic idea. It turns any light into a remote-control light. No more getting out of bed to turn off the overhead light. No more turning off the basement light, then walking up the stairs in the dark. Sounds good to us.

And the included IR remote works for multiple bulbs. So no more walking around to every lamp in the house before bed. And Yep, AwoX could’ve stopped there and this would be a fine remote-control LED bulb.

Then they stuck a speaker in it.

All the sudden everybody wants to mash up a speaker and a lightbulb. There’s a certain logic to it. The speaker draws power from the socket. With Bluetooth, the speaker doesn’t need wires. With LEDs, the bulbs don’t get hot enough to melt the speakers. There are lightbulbs all over your house, and having speakers all over your house seems cool.

But what do you do with it? Really?

They’re not the kind of speakers you’d use for listening to music unless you don’t care what music sounds like. Ditto for movies, probably. Still, it’s gotta have some kind of use, right? Or else why would there be so many of them? Maybe on a kid’s nightstand. Or to listen to podcasts at your desk. Or in your porchlight to play eerie sound effects on Halloween. Or to carry out gaslighting “voice of God” pranks.

It’s not a problem specific to these StriimLIGHT bulbs. They’re pretty typical of their kind, except for the heinousness of spelling “stream” “striim”. They’re not the higher-end ones where you can set multiples up in an array; the StriimLIGHT is strictly a one-speaker, one-source kinda gal. They’re perform as well as you’d expect on both aural and auroral fronts. On the full-size one, the 10-watt speaker sounds as good as the 8-watt light (40-watt equivalent) looks. The mini has a smaller 3-watt speaker and 3-watt bulb (12-watt equivalent), so of course it’s neither as loud nor as bright. (We bet whoever decided to measure speaker and bulb strength in watts never imagined this watt pileup.) As we said, the remote’s pretty cool. It’s fine.

But when we see these ingenious gizmos on Kickstarter or Indiegogo, or we get the same feeling we get flipping through SkyMall, or wandering through Sharper Image back in the day: “Ooh, cool, I want that” followed by “Come on, what would you do with that thing?” followed by “Holy shit, that price! Yeah, right!”. At least with Skymall and Sharper image, you know you’ll probably actually get the product you paid for.

So, fine, here it is at a really good price, and it actually exists. We still have trouble coming up with that one killer application for a little speaker that stays fixed in a lamp.

Tell you what: if you’re reading this in the first half-hour or so of this sale, post your ideas in the forum discussion. If our own @Dave likes your idea, he’ll send you one of these free.

If you missed that, look in the discussion for your ideas from your fellow Mehtizens about how the StriimLIGHT speaky-lighty thingy can make your life more awesome. You don’t get any free stuff beyond good advice. Just to be clear.

Who knows? If somebody makes a strong case for the StriimLIGHT, we might wind up buying a few ourselves. Man, now we’re glad SkyMall doesn’t have a forum.