The Govee Table Lamp 2 Pro with built-in JBL speaker is one of the weirdest and most wonderful lighting gadgets I’ve tested lately. It’s a hybrid of bold RGB lighting, Bluetooth audio, and Govee’s DreamView system for syncing lights to music. It's a Lava Lamp for the digital age (kids, go ask your parents what that is).
Design and build
From a design perspective, the Govee Table Lamp 2 Pro is an absolute centerpiece. It’s also quite large, and reminds me of the Mac Pro trashcan design. It weighs about 5 lbs and measures roughly 6 inches in diameter by 10 inches tall.
Somehow, they’ve managed to cram 210 individual pixels inside this thing, so the main opaque part of the speaker at the top can display the most vibrant and dynamic designs I've ever seen in this kind of table light.
On the base, you’ve got this kind of floating feel of a hypnotic vortex or black hole frozen in ice. It’s hard to describe, but really quite something to behold. I can imagine getting quite lost just staring at this thing.
When paired with the separately controllable underside lighting, it refracts around the internal shape and down onto the table surface.
There’s one physical button on the top plus four touch controls. The physical button controls the power; volume plus/minus, scene mode, and play/pause are all touch controls.
Battery surprise
So, quick confession: I usually test out products without knowing beforehand what they do. I don’t read the manual unless I need to; I’ll research later for the in-depth specs and capabilities to see what else I should test. But I want that sort of authentic user experience—unbox it and play with it right away. Companies will often send a “reviewer guide” out to influencers, and I don’t think I’ve ever read one. I probably shouldn't be telling you that.
In this case, that meant I had absolutely no idea that the Table Lamp 2 Pro had a battery in it. So there I am, having recorded some B-roll, tested out the maximum volume level, pressed to turn it off, unplugged it, put my phone in my pocket—and as I was carrying it over to put it on the table and tidy up, imagine my surprise to find it suddenly blaring out my music. I must have hit the play button from the lock screen. Scared the bejesus out of me, actually. Good thing I have deep carpets, or this would have shattered.
Suffice to say: this has a battery. 5200mAh, to be exact. Obviously, your battery life will depend on volume, brightness, complexity of the lighting scene, etc., but Govee quotes 4.5 hours at 50% brightness and 50% volume.
Speaker quality
JBL is no stranger to portable speakers, even ones with lighting built-in. The closest offering they had before was the JBL Pulse 4—same 10W speaker output, though that had a much smaller battery at only 1000mAh.
The Table Lamp 2 Pro has a 5200mAh battery, 2.5-inch 10W speaker system with two passive radiators, plus a lot more LEDs. At this price point, I wouldn’t expect a much larger cone size, but 2.5 inches is still a little on the tinny side for my ears. I had to use the Music app on my phone to increase the bass level to something more to my taste—and that doesn't work for other apps, like Spotify (at least on iPhone, there is no system-wide EQ setting).
That’s usually going to be the case with any portable speaker, though. And to be clear—it probably sounds great to most people, and gets really loud. I just prefer more bass.
Also worth noting: you can pair two of them for a stereo setup if you want.
Visual quality and brightness
The white light goes up to 600 lumens, which is almost blinding on a light of this size. Though as ever, the colours don’t get nearly as bright, and the numbers aren’t quoted.
There are over 100 preset scenes in the Govee Home app, as well as a comprehensive DIY mode to make your own, which you’ll either ignore completely or get lost in for a few hours trying to perfect.
Bluetooth and ambient audio
I’ve mentioned this is a Bluetooth speaker; that’s separate Bluetooth to your lamp control. You enter pairing mode by holding down the play button, then you connect—very simple. And at that point, you can use the built-in audio scene modes for very responsive reactive lighting displays.
You don’t need to use the built-in speaker for that, either—if you have music playing on your stereo system, then that also works. Govee claims a response time of 32ms between hearing a sound and reacting to it, so that’s impressive.
As an audio device, the Table Lamp 2 Pro features a range of built-in soundscapes with accompanying light shows. Some of the preset scenes are also paired with specific soundsets. You can change those, customize as you wish, or remove the audio if you find it annoying—the interface for doing that is really easy. The ambient audio is a little disappointing though. It’s the same library of audio sounds that other Govee audio products have, and it always feels to me like the clips are too short, don’t loop nicely, or aren’t detailed enough. The fire one, for instance, just feels kind of lacklustre and repetitive. So I’d recommend pulling up a YouTube video or Spotify playlist if you're a big fan of ambient soundscapes.
You can also adjust the presets that are stored on the speaker itself—those are the ones you can cycle through with the mode toggle button. So if you have some favourite ambient sound and light combinations, you can put those on without needing to use the app. Brilliant. Highly customizable to fit your needs exactly.
DreamView
The Table Lamp 2 Pro is a DreamView controller. Not a video controller like the Govee AI Sync Box which matches lighting to your screen content, but an audio controller. That means it can run your party light shows. Just place it in the room and either use it as a Bluetooth speaker, or have it pick up on your own sound system’s audio from the built-in microphone, and it can control the rest of the room lighting (like the Skyline, Neon Rope Light, and Floor Lamp 2 featured below).
You could obviously just set all your lights to do some audio-reactive mode, but by having this act as a music DreamView controller, you can get a synchronized, cohesive display.
Matter compatibility
With the Matter pairing code on the base, adding it into your smart home ecosystem of choice is trivial. Though you’ll still need the Govee Home app or you’re losing out on 90% of the functionality.
As ever, over Matter you can change the colour and brightness—and that’s it. A single uniform colour. No scene control. No individual segment control.
I also found the same weirdness with warm and cold white not always provoking a response from the light. The range of tonality is very restricted, and if you try to select outside that range, it just doesn’t work. With the colour selector, it snaps back to a more white-ish version. With the white selector, it just ignores your command entirely. You can work around that by saving presets, but it feels a little buggy.
For me, that means using Matter on these is literally just to turn it on or off. You can leave your favourite scene selected, and as long as you don’t touch the colour, the on/off and brightness controls will work with whatever scene is currently active.
There’s no other Matter functionality. No audio streaming. There’s no AirPlay either. It’s purely a Bluetooth thing.
Should you buy Govee Table Lamp 2 Pro?
There’s no doubt this is an incredible centerpiece—but I can’t help feeling it screams for attention a bit too much.
Compared to the original table lamp, it’s positively enormous. It’s got a battery to be portable, but there’s no carry handle or bag that comes with it, and it’s not waterproof. So portability is restricted to bedroom-to-kitchen. I wouldn’t recommend taking this down the beach as the gorgeous acrylic base is likely to be scratched up.
It’s not really a party speaker, either. At $180, the Table Lamp 2 Pro is somewhere in the middle of the budget for party speakers—if it were one. A quick glance on Amazon shows me you could buy a 160W massive deep-bass party speaker for around the same price. They might even have LED functions, though not nearly as fancy as this. Or you could pay a lot more for something like the Sonos Move at just under $500. Either way, I don't think you're buying this as party speaker.
You’re not buying this as a smart speaker either—it doesn’t have Sonos support or a voice assistant built-in. It’s literally just Bluetooth.
As a table lamp or elaborate bedside light? It looks stunning...but it's a bit on the big side. It takes up half my bedside table. You probably don't need a 210-LED pattern system and 600 lumens for that, either.
The best use case for this is probably someone who already has a bunch of Govee lights in their room but would like another one for the table that can act as a music DreamView controller for synchronized party lighting—not necessarily to use the built-in speaker. That's just a bonus.
