Govee Floor Lamp Pro review: Tallest, best, brightest, smartest

I am a huge fan of smart lights. I love illuminating my house when I wake up and basking it in a warm, moody, smart string light glow for movie nights. Smart lights have advanced enough to sync with games, music, and television, and most can be intuitively controlled from your phone. Govee’s smart light selection ranges from outdoor smart lights to simple bulbs to a collection of floor lamps. The new Floor Lamp Pro is the most sophisticated of the latter bunch, but also the most expensive, so is it worth it?

Price, availability, and specs

The Govee Floor Lamp Pro is available in gray or black models directly through Govee, but it’s also on Amazon if you prefer to shop there. While the lamp has a suggested retail price of $220, it’s currently discounted to $205 on Govee’s site.

What’s good about the Govee Floor Lamp Pro?

It sets the vibe with lights and tunes

I had an overall excellent experience with Govee’s most sophisticated floor lamp, but a few features stood out above all else. I especially liked that the light bar rotates a full turn, so you can point the lights in whichever direction you need them.

There’s also a speaker built into the base, a new integration that sets the Floor Lamp Pro apart from its family members, the Floor Lamp 2 and the Lyra. The speaker connects directly to your phone via Bluetooth, plays ambient nature noises and instrumental songs through the Govee app, or can be controlled by Alexa and Google Assistant. This lamp is Matter-certified, too.

The speaker’s sound quality meets expectations, not an audiophile’s dream, but it does the trick for some casual enjoyment. The volume was enough to comfortably fill a 750-square-foot space with music. Like most of Govee’s other smart light offerings, including the Floor Lamp 2, this lamp can be music-reactive, setting light changes to the rhythm of a sound source. The Floor Lamp Pro, which can respond to music played through its own speaker or picked up from ambient noise, was snappier and more on-beat with music played from an external source than the Floor Lamp 2 was.

The Floor Lamp Pro is just under five and a half feet tall, so it has about eight inches on the Floor Lamp 2. The perfect height for a floor lamp depends on your unique space, but I like this height for illuminating a reading nook. I preferred the shorter Floor Lamp 2 for flanking my entertainment center.

At 2,100 lumens, the Floor Lamp Pro casts a very bright glow, but you should still consider it an ambient mood light instead of a room-filling illumination. The Philips Hue Gradient Signe Floor Lamp puts out about 450 more lumens, so you may want to consider that for a bigger space. Like Govee’s other floor lamps, the light bar on the Floor Lamp Pro isn’t all that pleasant to stare at and is more meant to point into a corner or at a wall and shed soft light on the nearby area. The light segments in the Floor Lamp Pro are also far smoother and less visible than the Floor Lamp 2’s.

The Floor Lamp Pro offers 82 preset light scenes. Some are inspired by natural sights, like a field of flowers or a sunset. Others follow the color palette of a holiday, such as Christmas or Halloween. Others are meant to capture certain emotions, ranging from excitement to meditation.

These scenes are a lot of fun to explore, but if you can’t find anything you like, the Govee app puts the light scheme in your hands with a DIY mode that can set custom light scenes down to the segment. It’ll also generate schemes based on a sports team logo, famous artwork, or even the picture you took of the flowers in your garden.

A lighted base is a major positive, and since it can be turned on independently of the light bar, it acts as a nice night light for late-night snack runs or guiding guests to the restroom. The included remote works well and has at least a 15-foot range. Still, I almost immediately ditched the remote for control via the Govee companion app or my Google Home app, with which the lamp integrated well.

What’s bad about the Govee Floor Lamp Pro?

Nothing major, but keep smart assistant limitations in mind

Most of my time with the Floor Lamp Pro has been very positive, but here are a few minor notes. As a consequence of the design, the lamp is a bit wobbly when jostled. You need to put some force in to topple it, but it’s something I think a clumsy puppy or careening toddler could accomplish.

Even though the material quality and my experience assembling the Floor Lamp Pro were largely the same as those of the Floor Lamp 2, my Pro had some light bleeding through the edges where the metal segments of the light strip’s backing slide together. It’s not glaringly obvious, but it’s noticeable if you stare.

There are also some limitations to complex lighting scenes when you control the smart lamp with Google. If you have more than one Govee floor lamp, the Google Home app can group them for simultaneous controls and will, by default, turn the lamp on to its last-used scheme whether it was set in Google Home or the Govee App.

However, the Google Home app itself can only set the lamps (either together or individually) to a simple one-hue scheme out of 42 color options. This is obviously a massive oversimplification of what the Floor Lamp Pro can do, and it makes things tricky when you have multiple people in the home who prefer different light vibes, as was my case. I use a “good morning” Google routine every morning, which turns the Floor Lamp Pro on to a bright, warm white light.

My partner uses an “I’m home” routine after work, which he would like the Floor Lamp Pro to be included in. However, he prefers a specific scene in the Govee app called Aura that uses a moving scheme of pinks, purples, and blues. Google Home cannot initiate a Govee color scheme, so even though Google will turn the lamp on for him, he has to go to the Govee app and select Aura.

Should you buy it?

Maybe not the best smart lamp for pairs, but it is great on its own

I couldn’t justify buying two Floor Lamp Pros to flank either side of my gaming desk, which is something I’ve wanted to do with smart lamps for a while. Two speakers in that close range are definitely overkill, as is the brighter light of the Pro over the Floor Lamp 2, and this is the most expensive Govee Floor Lamp option.

However, it’s one of my favorite smart light products that I’ve used so far. The onboard speaker, spinning light bar, and extra height make the Floor Lamp Pro a no-brainer choice if you’re shopping for a bedside light, or a reading lamp.