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Twinkly Strings Gold Edition review score
Generalize
If you like Christmas and want to make your decoration as impressive as possible, Twinkly String lights are a great choice. You have all the features you expect from smart home lighting, as well as unique and creative options for mapping lights and selecting or designing custom lighting effects.
advantage
- Mappable lighting with custom effects
- Indoor and outdoor compatible
- Relatively easy to use
- Option to group lights for a large display
- Don’t like competitors
I recently Reviewed Twinkly Flex and Line Smart LED lights. I am impressed; although the whole system is not as refined as Philips Hue, it is outstanding in terms of creativity, with the option to map your lights and combine them together and create custom lighting patterns.
Although there may be many competing smart LED light bars, smart LED light strings may Christmas decorate. This is where Twinkly monopolizes the market.
With Twinkly, it’s not just a case of being able to turn on/off the lights or change the hue and brightness. They allow you to map where the lights are placed and use custom lighting designs based on your location. As far as I know, there is no other solution on the market that can compete with this creative function.
Twinkly Strings options/specifications
The sample I sent is 20m, with 250 lights. It is a gold version using amber, white and warm white LEDs (AWW).
However, options include 100, 250, 400, and 600 LEDs.
Then you can choose Multicolor RGB, Multicolor+White RGBW, Amber and White AWW.
In addition, the specifications are:
- Model: Second generation
- IP rating: IP44 (applicable to indoor or outdoor)
- Control: WiFI or Bluetooth
- Life: more than 30000 hours
- Warranty period: 1 year
set up
The settings are the same as for Flex and Line models.The controller is built into the string, so there is no hub like yours Philips Hue And others.
- You need to connect to a 2.4Ghz network
- In the app, choose to add a new device and select the model you want (2nd generation)
- When you plug in the light, you need to press and hold the pairing button until it flashes blue.
- Then you need to provide a password for your network
- Option to map your lights
In my previous Twinkly review, I encountered some setup problems, but with these problems, everything succeeded for the first time
Mapping lights
The ability to map lights is the main reason to buy Twinkly. You have two choices, you can do basic mapping or advanced mapping. With the basic option, it only maps from one location, while the advanced option allows you to take multiple readings, and it will indicate the number of registered lights.
At first I ran into some problems in getting an accurate map. I turned off the lights in the room, which caused our walls to glare when the LED lights were on, which caused the app to map it to my wall lights.
After turning on the lights, I only used the basic options to get a fairly accurate map.
Design options/use applications
The application has four main parts:
- equipment
- Layout/mapping
- Foreign exchange guide
- Effect
- Basic lighting control
In the device section, you can select the device you want to control. It is also possible to create a group so that I can synchronize the lighting between Twinkly Flex, Line and String lights to create a more impressive display.
Then under basic light control, you have a similar set of functions as most smart lights. Color/hue control, brightness, timer and on/off.
With the help of effects and FX wizards, you can gain creative control that other systems lack.
I’m not very creative, so I prefer predefined controls. By default, there are 29 different effects to choose from. Depending on the number of lights you have, how they are arranged, and the color model you choose, many effects will look similar or even different.
On the tree I decorate at will, there is not much difference between Cool Sky, Peachy, Sherbert or Mint. However, if you have a lot of neatly arranged lights, you may get better results.
The top and bottom style effects provide the most impressive lighting, and you can clearly see how the mapping function has an impact. Both the Snow and Firework options look particularly good.
We finally chose the Candy Cane design, which provides a pleasant flashing effect without being as distracting as the firework design.
If 29 designs are not enough for you, you can download various designs from the Twinkly effect store. These are all marked as free downloads, but it looks like they can also open the store as a paid design.
For the adventurous, you can try to create your own design. Again, this may be more effective for larger and/or cleaner installations. I hope it will also make children happy for hours.
You can also set up a playlist so that you can loop through different designs in a specific time period.
Synchronized groups, downloadable effects, customizable effects, and playlists are all perfect for those who like to go all out with Christmas decorations. People with a large number of outdoor displays may like the ability to program all the lights to work with well-designed ones.
Prices and alternatives
The Twinkly String Light Gold Edition I received is currently on Amazon for £139.99
John Lewis listed about 250 LED RGB light strings, priced at 95 pounds.
There are various application-controlled LED Christmas lights on Amazon, and the price is much lower than Twinkly, but none of them seem to provide the same level of control, so they are not comparable.
A picture of a brand Amhomely seems to provide the same features as Twinkly, but the price is only 20 pounds. In fact, it seems that the images they use are actually the Twinkly app and user comments; without mapping, the lights cannot be controlled individually.
overall
As you might expect, these are by far the most expensive Christmas tree lights on the market, but nothing else can compete with them.
If you want to have some creative control over Christmas lights, then this is both the best and the only option on the market.
Thankfully, the overall products are good, they are easy to set up, and the app is generally easy to use. The overall effect of lighting up your Christmas tree with a design specific to your Christmas tree is more impressive than the old uncontrollable lights.
Last updated on 2021-12-08 / Affiliate link / Image from Amazon Product Advertising API
