When I upgraded to IKEA KAJPLATS light bulbs, I also picked up the BILRESA dual button and the BILRESA scroll wheel.

Voice control has proven to be enough for my daily routine, but my interest in physical controls is what got me to buy these along with the bulbs. Compared to the bulbs, I have to say the experience is fairly disappointing.

The BILRESA controllers come in two styles: one with two buttons, and one with a clickable scroll wheel. Both are powered by 2 AAA batteries rather than a rechargeable cell. Both also come with a metal plate with adhesive on the back, so you can stick it to the wall and attach the controller magnetically — and still pull it off and carry it around when you need to.

BILRESA remote control with dual button

Pairing it with Apple Home is easy, but the control settings can get fairly complex. Each button supports three actions — short press, double press and long press — which means six different functions depending on how you set it up. As good as the button is at remembering all of them, I don't think my brain is.

The most straightforward setup is to link it to one group of lights and use it to turn those lights on and off. But without the extra actions configured, it isn't really a device that lives up to the "smart" label.

In practice I did add extra settings: double press for 50% brightness (for ambience), and long press to keep one light on while turning the other off (for TV time). Guess what — it's quicker to just tell Siri what to do than to recall which button does what.

Maybe IKEA's product managers wanted to give users more flexibility, but considering most Matter hubs are just smart speakers, this button feels like pure redundancy.

BILRESA remote control with scroll wheel

The scroll wheel gets even more complicated. It has a clickable scroll wheel on top and a clickable frame that appears to switch between three light dots. The hardware seems straightforward: switch between three devices, then use the wheel to turn them on and off or adjust brightness. The software, however, is a mess.

The current Matter protocol apparently still doesn't handle scroll wheels well, so with Apple Home and Google Home you don't get native support for the wheel. So the one thing a scroll wheel is obviously good at — dimming — isn't actually available in Apple Home.

That's only one out of three pages of the nine button settings UI

When you connect it to Apple Home, the settings screen presents the device as nine buttons: six with single/double press customization, and three with single/double/long press. Never mind the mismatch between one physical scroll wheel and nine buttons in the UI — even if you could map every function properly, 21 total actions is beyond human memory capacity, I'm afraid.

After fumbling with it for a while, I simply gave up on trying to figure it out. And even if I did set it up properly, teaching my family how to use it without fucking it up would be mission impossible.

Summary

Compared to the KAJPLATS bulbs I reviewed earlier, which are fabulous products, the BILRESA controllers are miserable to use, if not completely useless. Again, I appreciate IKEA building out a full set of smart home products for a complete ecosystem, but I don't think you should spend money on these. A basic smart speaker is the better buy.