The Govee M1 LED strip is flexible and can be tucked away unobtrusively for accent lighting or featured prominently to form a pattern or design. | Image: Govee
Basic strips of cheap LEDs are commodity items these days, but Govee has a new premium smart LED strip that is promising new levels of brightness and sound-reactive light shows. The Govee LED Strip Light M1 is a five-meter / 16-foot RGBIC Plus-powered light that can produce 16 million colors and has a built-in mic for syncing to music and movies. It also has 11 music modes and additional light settings like fade, twinkle, stream, and flow that you can dial in through the Govee Home app — with some controls accessible via voice command when synced to Amazon Alexa or Google Assistant.
The Govee M1 is available now on Amazon and Govee’s online store for $99.99, and it seems aimed squarely at Philips Hue’s gradient light strips. Govee claims the M1 can output more than twice as many lumens as the Hue strip offerings and that it achieved this by using 60 LEDs per meter (arranged in 10 segments). That’s about double the density of LEDs found on most basic strips.
Image: Govee
Tucking light strips behind furniture creates some cool backlighting, though you can sometimes see hot spots of individual LEDs when they’re positioned right up to a wall.
But while Hue has a much more expansive ecosystem of smart home lights and accessories, Govee’s M1 is cheaper and longer and also leverages some of its own connectivity with other Govee products. The M1 can be set to DreamView mode for syncing up with Govee’s camera-powered LEDs that color match what’s on a TV or monitor, allowing you to extend the light show onto a wall or discreetly tuck it away for more ambient spill lighting. If you already own a Govee DreamView T1 or G1, you may be able to get your entire room to light up with what you’re watching or playing.
Installing the M1 should be as simple as deciding where it goes and sticking it in place using the adhesive preinstalled along the strip. It plugs into a standard wall outlet and lacks any water resistance, so the party vibes aren’t going al fresco. Also, you have to want all five meters of light because, unlike other light strips, you cannot cut the M1 down to a shorter length. On the flip side, if five meters isn’t long enough for you, you can buy a second M1 strip and connect them together for a combined 10 meters / 33 feet to unce-unce-unce to.