A year ago, I had never heard of Aqara. Then they released a well-reviewed sensor that no one else had, the FP2, a “presence sensor.” A quick look at their site will confirm that they are indeed the sensor company, with a deep bank of smart sensors that no one else has. Plus, after testing many of them, they work when the competition simply doesn’t. Now, a sensor is a small thing to install and set up, but my trust in their sensors was the reason I was willing to install their new T1M ($149.99) ceiling light. A smart ceiling light might not seem like much, but this is one of the first lights we’ve seen from a big name brand. It has a ton of smart features, like visual notifications based on other Aqara products. The best reason to trust the T1M was simple: it’s huge, and my kitchen desperately needed more light. The product is so popular that it sold out in its first week, but Aqara says it will be adding more in the coming weeks.

The first thing you need to know about the T1M is that it’s a spaceship of a light. The light is 19.5 inches wide and will take up a fair bit of space on your ceiling. The fairly innocuous main bulb is a spherical disk and adjusts to a range of whites from warm to cool. Then a ring of RGB IC LEDs surrounds the white light and you can control them individually. It mounts fairly flat, sitting less than three inches from the ceiling. The light is molded plastic, but it doesn’t feel cheap. Installation was quick: it’s lightweight, making it easy to hold with one hand. The light came with all the hardware you need to hardwire it into the existing wiring of the light.

The T1M supports Matter over Threads and Zigbee, but requires an Aqara hub to act as a bridge. This device works with Google, Alexa, and Siri. Normally, needing a hub would be a bummer, but Aqara currently offers the most entertaining hub on the market: a 2k wired indoor security camera that looks like a cat. (There are also hubs with a standard design to consider.)

It took no effort at all to get the light online in the Aqara app, and from there it was just a matter of customizing it. White is easy: you just tune it to whatever white range you have in your home (people tend to gravitate toward warm or cool white). Now, there are tons of smart LED light products on the market, and most of them give you the same overwhelming amount of color options that these bulbs do. Nanoleaf has done a great job of offering subtle, tasteful lighting schemes that you’ll actually want to use, and I think Aqara has done the same here. Essentially, the T1M works like a sun: you can swap out the white in the center sphere for subtle color profiles based on different times of day. You can even set schedules so that the light mimics the time of day indoors, gradually turning on with the sunrise: they call this “adaptive lighting.” You don’t need the same brightness all day long, so the light can adapt. The outdoor lighting gets a little wilder, but can still be subtle if you want, with themes like meteor, sunset and autumn. It’s all fully customizable, from colors to motion, speed and brightness. My only gripe here was that the slowest motion setting was still too fast for my taste.