BYB is a company that sells LED lighting solutions. Over the last several days, I’ve been using one of their LED desk lamps, that includes a USB charging port. At this risk of spoiling the ending too early, I liked this lamp. It’s fairly simple in its design, and for what it does, it does it well.
The design of the lamp is monochromatic in its coloring, having a glossy black base with capacitive buttons on it, a silver neck, and a rectangular lamp head that is also glossy black; each of these components is made of plastic. As an Aside, the box the lamp shipped in also included a microfiber cloth for cleaning fingerprints off of the glossy plastic, which did seem to show up frequently in my use. The neck is attached to both the base and the head via hinges, so both the neck can fold toward the base to the point of collapsing and making contact, while the head can range from collapsing to (by my rough eyeball estimate) a little short of 45 degrees above what would be parallel with the base and/or the surface that it would be resting on. And both of these hinges allow the points to collapse toward the neck for the purpose of portability, as the head and base fold inward towards each other, so the lamp becomes quite flat. This was the shape it was shipped in, and admittedly would make for easy transport, though it’s not really what I would picture for a “mobile” desk lamp. To round out the topic of its appearance, the capacitive buttons are backlit with bright blue LEDs when the buttons are activated. And while bright, they don’t outshine the lamp proper. Bear in mind, finding them in the dark is a bit tricky, but I’m not sure that this lamp was designed with that in mind.
The function of the lamp is where this unit “shines’ (sorry, couldn’t help myself). There are several capacitive buttons that are arrayed there. The power toggle is denoted with the standard icon, and tapping it toggles the power as one would expect. In a nice feature, the settings of the lamp (more on that in a bit) are retained after the lamp is powered off. I even unplugged the unit to see if a trickle charge was used to retain the settings, and the settings “survived” that as well. Next to the power button is an encircled “M”, which I would take to mean “mode. Tapping on this cycles the color that the lamp shines through a handful of colors. The page on amazon indicates that there are four different colors that it cycles through, but I could really only notice two.
At one end, is a softer light with an tinge of orange to it, while at the other end of the spectrum is a bright and frosty white; I presume that the remaining two are partials that fall between the extremes). Two other buttons each contain an arroow, with one facing upwards and one down. These buttons allow users to control how bright the lamp shines. Both the color and brightness are retained after the lamp is powered down. The last two buttons are timers. One button activates a 1 hour timer (after which the lamp powers itself off) and the other activates it for two. This was the only setting for the lamp that didn’t seem to “stick”. Whenever the lamp was turned on, the color and brightness resumed, but whatever alarm I had set previously was not there.
The lamp’s base has two ports in the back. One is for it to receive power via USB, and the lamp includes both an adapter that is plugged into standard electrical outlets, and a traditional USB cable to connect it to the lamp. There’s a second USB port for charging a single device. Having this greatly enhances the utility of the lamp, as one can connect a phone, tablet, or other device into the base for it to charge. It is advertised as charging at 2 amps, and on my stock Nexus 6 (which has a 3,220 mAh battery). During a thirty minute test charge, it went from 27% to 47%. Quick charge, this is not. That being said, it struck me as ample nonetheless for typical charging needs.
As I said in the opening, I like this lamp. It retains the color and brightness that were last used, even after removing the plug from the outlet. It’s got a nice timer, so one can use it as a timer when reading in bed, or having it turn itself off after sleep has begun. So, I’d give this a 8. There really isn’t much to complain about, short of the range of lamp colors having adequate distinction. Otherwise, it worked as promised, and was quite useful.
