Govee Uplighter Floor Lamp Review

Design and setup

Right out of the box, the Uplighter makes an impression. The packaging feels more like a robot vacuum than a lamp, and the physical footprint is on the large side.

Assembly is simple enough: four pole sections thread together with a central cable running through the middle like a very long, bendy straw. The wiring is internal, but not permanently fixed, which means you can remove pole sections if you want to reduce its height. If you use all the poles, it stands at 1.7 meters tall.

Up top is a dome-shaped lighting unit that looks more sci-fi prop than lamp head. It houses a trio of lighting components: the white downlight, the rotating RGB projector, and an ambient ring light around the side. The head can be tilted 30 degrees in either direction to help aim the effect.

You also get a couple of onboard buttons, a power toggle and a scene controller, along with a cable routing cut-out in the base, so you can feed the cord whichever direction suits your socket location best.

That 28cm-wide dome is where the magic (and some quirks) happen. It’s fronted by a rippled plastic lens, which is key to the Uplighter’s signature projection effect.

Syncing and the Govee app

Fire it up for the first time and you’ll see the side ring glow in a subtle pink, with the other two zones defaulting to a soft white.

Pairing options include scanning the Matter QR code (visible near the top of the pole) or letting the Govee app do its Bluetooth-based discovery routine. I used the app method, and it found the lamp straight away.

It’s worth noting that the lamp only supports 2.4GHz Wi-Fi. If your network merges both bands under one SSID, you might have to temporarily disable 5GHz to complete setup.

Matter support means you’re not locked into the Govee app; you can control the Uplighter via Alexa, Apple Home, Google Home, SmartThings, Homey or pretty much any other smart home system you use, but to really access everything it can do, the Govee app is still very much needed.

If you want basic control, Matter will do the job. But, as with any of the brand’s more complex lights, features like scenes, DIY modes, and multi-zone control require you to fire up the app.

Fortunately, the app’s had a much-needed revamp. It’s still a bit convoluted, and first-time users might find the UI a bit overloaded, but it’s a lot more intuitive and responsive than it used to be.

Within the app, you’ll find a stack of categorised scenes under tabs like Shape, Emotion, Funny, and Festival. There are around 100 presets to play around with, and you can also craft your own in the DIY section, or download ones made by the wider Govee community.

If you’re feeling playful, the app’s built-in AI lighting assistant can generate custom scenes based on prompts. Requests like “desert sunset” or “haunted forest” usually result in something that captures the vibe surprisingly well.

More creative prompts, say, “birthday rave for cat”, are hit and miss, but still fun to play with.

Performance

There’s a lot happening here, and most of it is impressive, though it’s not without limitations.

The big visual hook is the ripple-effect uplight. It throws textured waves of colour onto the ceiling in an effect that’s oddly hypnotic. At a glance, it’s one of the more unique lighting effects I’ve seen from a smart lamp. The problem is what happens when you dig into the details.

Rather than using Govee’s usual RGBIC setup with seamless blending, this projector uses separate red, green, and blue LEDs behind a rotating lens to produce the ripple. So instead of getting mixed hues like purple or yellow, you get two distinct colour waves playing alongside each other: red and blue for purple, red and green for yellow, and so on.

It looks nice in primary colours, red, green, or blue, but anything in between can end up looking more like a tech demo than a polished effect. You’ll also notice that the lens up top is always active.

There’s no option to disable the ripple and just have a static uplight. You can slow the movement down to zero, but the effect still sits there, etched into the light.

White light handling on the projector is a bit of a mystery, too. Some pre-set scenes clearly make use of a dedicated white or warm-white element, but this isn’t something you can replicate easily in the DIY section. You can select a static warm or cool white, but mixing white with colour isn’t on the table.

That ambient RGB strip around the side is a separate zone, and you can control it independently, but in practice, it’s not all that visible, especially if the lamp’s standing below eye level. It’s more of a glowing accent than an actual lighting feature.

Thankfully, the white-only downlight is much more straightforward. With a range of 2700K to 6500K and a brightness of up to 1000 lumens, it’s easily bright enough to function as a proper reading or task light. There are no visual effects here, just clean, consistent white light, so it’s great for general use and ideal if you need a reading lamp or just want a warm glow in the evening.

One thing to note is ceiling height. In my office, which has 7-foot ceilings, the uplight effect only spread across about two meters. To test what it might look like in a taller space, I removed a couple of pole segments and placed the lamp on a lower surface.

Sure enough, the light show improved dramatically. So if you’ve got high ceilings, you’ll get a lot more out of the ripple projector.

Finally, there’s a Music Mode, which uses either the built-in microphone or your phone to sync lighting effects to audio. It works just as well here as it does on other Govee products and is ideal for parties or just creating a bit more atmosphere when watching a film or listening to tunes.

Should you buy it?