Music festival season might now be in full swing, but not everyone fancies muddy fields and moshing crowds. Govee’s second-gen smart light/speaker combo blends stadium-strength sound with the light show to match – just on a scale small enough to squeeze into your bedside table. The Table Lamp 2 Pro x Sound by JBL ($180) was first revealed at January’s CES show, and is finally going on sale later this month.
I’ve had the sleek-looking lamp illuminating my office for the last week. It’s a tech world team-up, with JBL supplying a punchy 2.5in full-range driver (plus the EQ tuning to go with it) and Govee focusing on the visuals.
The bowl-like shape and second, down-firing LED mood light reminds me of the Harman Kardon Aura speaker, except here the Govee Table Lamp is an opaque white. It’s distinctive enough when powered down, but underneath there’s a whopping 210 individually customizable RGB LEDs, which throw out a full 360 degrees of pulsating patterns and eye-catching colours.
They cast a vivd glow over whatever surface you place the lamp next to – more subtly during daylight hours, but with real flair at night. There’s nothing subtle about some of the lighting modes, while others can be a lot more relaxing.
All those LEDs shine brighter and look clearer than the ones Govee used for its last table lamp, so you can use ’em to create DIY images and patterns through the firm’s Home app. Or just pick from the 100+ preset lighting scenes, including a bunch that react to whatever tunes you happen to be piping through it via Bluetooth. Govee has sped up reaction times to a rapid 32ms, so the lights don’t lag behind the audio. Get some high intensity electronica going with some of the wilder scenes and it’s quite the party-starter.
The Table Lamp 2 Pro can do serious, too, putting out 600 lumens of adjustable white light. It’s switchable between 2700K and 6500K, so you can pick one colour temperature for work and another for relaxing once you clock off for the day. There was easily enough shine here to be the sole illumination in my home office. Being able to set a bunch of presets to the mode button on the lamp itself is a nice touch, saving you from reaching for your phone just to escape a rainbow onslaught in favour of something calmer.
There’s no carry handle, but the 5200mAh battery inside means the Table Lamp 2 Pro can bring the party pretty much anywhere. It’ll do four and a half hours of Bluetooth streaming at 50% light brightness and 50% volume. The power brick is proprietary though, so charging somewhere away from its usual home isn’t as easy as your typical Bluetooth speaker.
I’ve mainly left it plugged into mains power, so it’s always accessible to my Alexa and Google voice assistants. There’s Matter connectivity on board, too.
I was blown away by how loud the speaker can get; when sat a few feet away I could leave it at the lowest volume setting and hear tunes perfectly clearly. This was actually a problem at night, because it wouldn’t go quiet enough for bedtime listening without sound travelling to the next room. 40% was so loud I could hear it downstairs – on the other side of the house. With the doors closed.
You can also pair ’em in stereo mode if you’ve got two to hand, though that could result in a noise complaint from your neighbours. I didn’t have two to test the theory.
Happily JBL’s tuning ensures you get enjoyable amounts of low-end oomph and a clean, clear mid-range. The high-end is a little sharp and shrill depending on the track, and there’s no custom equalizer to dial things back either, but at the lower volume levels the tone didn’t leave much to complain about.
The Table Lamp 2 Pro x Sound by JBL will be on the Govee website and Amazon US from June 23, for $180. It’ll head to Europe and the UK later in the year.
