Your $15 IKEA lamp has nothing on the Philips Hue Go.

The Hue Go is exactly what it looks like: A portable bowl-shaped lamp that you can take with you wherever you want. Put it on your bedside table or on your desk or on your bookshelf or in your car or into the woods — wherever you want.

What makes the Hue Go different from "dumb" lamps is its Philips smart light bulb; the bulb can light up in one of 16 million different colors with an app.

At $100, it's pretty expensive for a small lamp. But then again, so are Philips' Hue smart light bulbs, which start at about $60 per bulb.

The Hue Go is a lesson in design restraint. About the size of an oversized grapefruit sliced in half, the lamp only has one button and a small protrusion on the back to prop it up at a slant and upright.

It's clean and minimalist and perfect for a guy like who me likes as little design as possible when it comes to home appliances.

Pretty bright lights

Press the button and the Hue Go toggles between seven preset colors (two white lights and five "natural dynamic effects"). The latter effects cycle between a spectrum of colors, including red to orange (Cozy Candle), yellow to green (Enchanted Forest), blue to red (Night Adventure), orange to purple (Sunday Coffee) and green to violet (Meditation).

Double press and hold the button and the Hue Go will cycle through a rainbow of colors until you release it.

See, simple!

Before trying out the Hue Go, I've never really considered having colored lighting at home. I've lived my entire life with two types of lighting: incandescent (for relaxing) and fluorescent (for studying and working). I'm fully aware that lighting can directly impact your mood and mindset, but colored lighting is a luxury, not a necessity.

The purple "mood lighting" is one the reasons why I deliberately choose to fly Virgin Airlines whenever possible. The color is soothing and helps me unwind in the claustrophobic confines of economy class. Purple lighting also helps me fall asleep faster, too.

The Hue Go's myriad colors exist entirely to set a mood. The 6-watt LED bulb shining at 300 lumens is brighter than I had expected when plugged into the outlet and even when it's running on its rechargeable lithium-ion battery, it's bright enough to light up my 150-square-foot bedroom. The battery isn't too bad, either: up to 3 hours on a charge.

Philips' marketing imagery shows smiling faces using the Hue Go in all kinds of weird situations, like having it in front of you while you're laying on the floor gaming in front of your TV. I never got that personal while testing the Hue Go, but I will say it's highly convenient to be able to bring the Hue Go and place it anywhere, inside and outside of your home.

Last weekend, I brought it along with me on a camping trip and used it in a tent and the other day it was a beacon on my bookshelf while I watched Interstellar for the fiftieth time in near darkness (it's the only way to watch a space movie).

Now for some bad news. While the presets are mostly lovely (I found Enchanted Forest and Cozy Candle to be very soothing and relaxing), choosing from the 16 million possible colors is a more convoluted process. If only it was as easy as pairing your phone to the Hue Go and opening up the official Hue app.

You will need a Philips Hue Bridge to connect your phone to the Hue Go. Image: Raymond Wong/Mashable

To select from the endless palette of colors, you need to have a Hue Bridge, a wireless receiver that connects to your router and syncs your Philips Hue lights together. And there lies the kicker: The Hue Go doesn't come with a Bridge and you can't buy it as a standalone device. The only way to use the app with the Hue Go is to buy a Hue starter kit, which comes with some Hue lightbulbs and can start at around $80-plus.

Basically, the Hue Go can only be used at its fullest potential if you've already bought into the Philips Hue smart lighting ecosystem. Otherwise, you'll have to spend extra to tap the millions of colors.

The Hue Go, like the Hue, is also supposed to work with the Amazon Echo, but I couldn't get it to work. No matter how many times I reset my Bridge and Echo and reconnected them, the Echo could never discover the Hue Go. The Echo recognized and connected to the regular Hue light bulbs, though, so I know it was working properly.

Basic and mediocre app

The Hue app can only be described as basic. You use it to turn the Hue Go on and off, adjust its brightness and switch between different preset or custom-made lighting schemes. The app also lets you set up alarms and timers, but those didn't work at all.

Lights off actually means lights on. The app sees the Hue Go, but the light never works with the alarm. Image: Raymond Wong/Mashable

Imagine that, a feature advertised right on the box that doesn't work at all. Like trying to get the Echo to recognize the Hue, I ended up giving up on the feature.

For what it's worth, the alarms feature works with the regular Hue light bulbs, but even then it's busted. The alarms section is so broken it only works when you've set an alarm to repeat on a certain day(s). If you don't check off a repeat day, the light bulb alarms never go off. That's not very smart. Worse, it isn't immediately clear the "Lights off" tab is where you select the Hue lights that you do want to turn on for the alarm. Any sane person would think the "Lights off" tab would be where you would select the bulbs you want to turn off.

A quick search online and scan through the app's reviews suggest I'm not crazy. People have been having issues with the alarms not working properly for years.

Like the rest of Hue's smart light bulbs, the Hue Go works better with apps. There's an entire ecosystem of third-party apps and If This Then That (IFFT) recipes that expand what the smart lights can do. One of my favorite Hue apps is Ambify, a $3 app that syncs your Hue lights to songs in iTunes and then pulses. Instant rave in your apartment. I bet there's a third-party Hue app out there that actually has an alarm feature that works, but how am I supposed to trust those when I can't even trust the official app to do what it says.

I do have concerns about the battery life and light inside. They're both non-removable, which means you'll need to buy a new one when they decide to bite the dust. Philips, for its part, says the Hue Go's bulb can "last over 15,000 hours or about 14 years" and the battery "has been tested to work for 20,000 hours."

Like the Hue smart light bulbs (or any smart light bulbs for that matter), the Hue Go is a nice little luxury. A hundred dollars a pop is a lot to ask for what is essentially a bowl that can be programmed to light up in millions of colors. I'd feel differently if the Hue Go didn't need a Hue Bridge and if the alarm feature actually worked, but as it stands, the smart bowl light is mostly a toy. If you have kids, they'll probably love it, though.