Poorly designed products and unhelpful customer service. Having spent £425 on two Hue Twilight bedside lamps which are advertised as having "Custom wake-up and sleep automations" and are advertised as not requiring a Hue Bridge, I reasonably expected that these would function as a wake up alarm every morning.

Be warned however, because without the Hue Bridge (additional purchase), they are bedside ornaments. The App is so poorly designed that the "automation" requires setting each and every day! That to me is the definition of a manual routine rather than an automation.

Philips-Hue's own website has a Bluetooth versus Bridge comparison table which indicates that "Automatic light control" works for either setup. The only limitations listed are for things that I don't need such as Out-of-home control and Access to Security Centre.

Customer Services could hardly have been less helpful. They simply keep parroting technically incompetent excuses that it's a limitation of Bluetooth which, as anybody with even basic technical knowledge, would understand is laughable nonsense: Bluetooth is a communications protocol and its only limitation is range.

The limitation is simply a poor design choice which could be remedied by an update.

Philips tell me that the "workaround" is for me to shell out more cash on a Hue bridge. Considering that I have no other Hue lamps in my house, it's like telling someone they need to manually adjust their fridge freezer temperature on a daily basis unless they buy a cloud based thermostat.

The attitude of the customer support has been obstinate, patronising, arrogant and finally ignorant (they have now simply stopped responding to my legitimate questions).

It's little wonder that US tech companies are trouncing European ones. Apple understood decades ago that the people who buy their products expect and deserve good after sales service. Philips just want to fob you off with inferior design, pocket the cash and then ignore you.

My 30 year old alarm clock can repeatedly wake me every day without manual intervention so it's beyond risible for Philips to claim that Bluetooth is the reason why these lamps cannot remember what time to wake me up.