Google and Govee team up to show off the Light Strip M1 at CES 2023
Matter will likely be the topic for smart homes in 2023, and CES is already preparing us for a flood of new and excellent smart home devices with support for the interoperability standard. Govee is ready to jump on the bandwagon, and the company has teamed up with Google to announce and showcase the LED Light Strip M1, its first Matter-enabled lighting product created as part of Google’s Matter Early Access Program.
In case you’re not familiar with what Matter is, it’s supposed to standardize how smart home devices communicate with each other and how they can be controlled, whether you have a Google Home, a Samsung SmartThings, or an Apple HomeKit apartment. In theory, all Matter-enabled devices should share a common feature set that you can control with any controller app you like.
With its new light strip, Govee hopes that it can provide a more reliable service. Given that Matter is based around local networking standards, products using it don’t need to rely on an internet connection or a company’s server, so it should be more resilient against internet outages or even a business going bankrupt. On a more mundane level, the lag between you pressing a button or uttering a voice command and the light turning on or off or changing colors should be much less noticeable.
Beyond Matter, Govee’s LED Light Strip M1 offers more features and upgrades. The M1 comes with what Govee calls RGBIC+ technology, which should make it possible to give you even more distinct lights across the length of the strip. There are also more beads per meter, making it possible for the strip to glow even brighter.
The LED Light Strip M1 will launch in “early 2023,” with a lot more Matter-enabled Govee products coming in the future. At CES, the company also announced a new AI-based gaming sync kit, which allows you to equip your monitor with back lighting for your gaming sessions.
