Twinkly - Smart Light Bundle 600 RGB LED Gen II

Ive wanted to “plus” my christmas light display for years, but just cant afford the thousands of dollars it takes to do it. This year i seriously looked into RGB lights for the first time, i bought a set for under $50 that after making my own frame to support it looked ok, but the animation that was described was only pre-set patterns, with no memory so you had to use the remote each night to set it back to the pattern i liked. This is when i found Twinkly and researched the product and read the reviews. It sounded very promising, i bet it was going to be too expensive - WRONG. The BestBuy bundle for 600 lights & the music dongle was an incredible value for under $200. No other retailer came close. I had an old clapsible tree frame i used to string this set to, Using zip ties it took a bit of time to get them on. The set is divided into 2 - 300 light strings, but the 2 strings are permently connected to the power source. Once it got dark enough i turned them on and went through the set up process. As i read there was a minor hiccup in getting it to connect, but only took one extra try. Mapping the lights is super easy and honestly the most impressive feature of the Twinkly brand. After that it was just playing with all the preset displays to pick a playlist for my tree. What i also found were downloadable displays (free) including a prancing raindeer! Finally a truly animated display! The app has many features including tools to create your own display patterns, built in timers, add multiple sets, and play to the included music dongle. Very happy to be able to get into animated lights for such a reasonable price!

600 lights goes a long way with these. You can make all kinds of designs with them . I used two sets of these and a 4' by 8' peg board to make a light wall.

I am a huge fan of the Twinkly products and this was the first set of lights that I purchased. We had this set on our 7 foot tree and it was the perfect amount for coverage. I was so impressed with the Twinkly app and the way it maps the lights. The preset effects are incredible, and I love that I can pair this with other sets. The latest firmware update also adds HomeKit support - such a cool set of lights. Definitely recommend these to all.

Absolutely the best Christmas tree lights you can get. Everyone is wowed by our tree. Super easy to use and to combine multiple strands. These afe expensive but the technology is worth it.

Loving them so far. Actually got them for the Christmas tree, but put them in the front window, think i need another set

They were a little tricky to set up to Wi-F. But they seem to be real high quality lights the patterns are amazing and offering to download new ones through the app was great.

Talk about taking your xmas tree to a whole new level!! This is absolutely amazing. And it comes with a usb dongle that makes the lights go to sounds. I was hesitant to spend this money on lights. Bit now ill never go back to ordinary ones.

Let's just get this out of the way, I'd give these lights a "it looks really good when it's set up and working" out of five. I didn't have any glaring, deal-breaking issues with the lights (there was one hiccup where the second string I used lost sync with the other two) or the app (which I will get to), it was just a handful of tiny annoyances that if polished out, these could be worth it to some people. The lights, they're super light they are very bright, and they are incredibly colorful. I was very worried that colors would be washed out or darker than the white and am pleasantly surprised actually at how bright the tree can get. It definitely makes an impression in the front room window. I kept them wrapped around a cardboard tube while I was hanging them up and I had no issues with the wires getting tangled or accidentally stepping on one and they broke or something. My 600 pack was actually two separate strands of 300 that were both tied at the end to the same controller. This wasn't an incredible deal-breaker because the length of no lights on the wire is decently long enough I was able to string the next string right up to where the other one ended. My 250 pack was also two strings tied to the same controller and my 100 pack was one string tied to another controller. The controllers are about a little larger than a Roku remote but now I do have three of them plugged in under my bookshelf currently. The lights do flash while you're setting them up but the patterns will not show up until you set the tree up in the app. The app is probably my biggest issue with the product itself. I am running a OnePlus 7 Pro and I am on their whatever latest build of Android 11 is. The controllers only connect via 2.4ghz, not a deal-breaker. Taking pictures of the tree to figure out where the lights are is incredibly easy. I did the full motion tracking where you take pictures from all sides, as long as you can get the whole tree in the view of your phone from decent angles all the way around, this will be easy. The first time I did this, only by having to do it a second time did I realize that I didn't originally map all the lights to the app. Basically you want to turn all the lights green, my inside lights took a few more pictures to figure out where they were but once they were all found in the app, it does a remarkably great job of keeping track of where all these little lights are. The app is, I don't know, good enough? I wish the customization from the default presets could be applied to custom ones. The drawing on the tree is fun but I so far have not kept any of those on the tree. The "store" for other light effects is alright but it's only a handful and there is no meaningful search or anything you can change about them. I did lose sync with my second set of lights at one point, they were just doing their own little rainbow color thing while the rest of the tree was fine. It was fortunate though because I mapped the tree better the second time but it took some time to figure out. Loading all of the different effects for the first time takes absolutely forever. Sending playlists to the lights themselves also takes a good amount of time (individual effect switching isn't too bad, it's just when you group them together). I have a few custom filters on the tree that I started with one idea in my head but then ended up with something close I could figure out how to do via the blending option. Some of the options in the blending section are a little vague and it's kind of hard to figure out what is really changing between the filters. I wish I was smarter about the lengths of lights I chose. I originally bought two 600 packs and realized that the second one would have been way too many lights on the tree. For these lights to look their best, I'd recommend wrapping the lights all the way to the trunk of the tree and forward to the front of the tree on pretty much every branch, similar to how pre-lit trees are strung with lights. I have an artificial tree so doing this branch by branch was "easy", but it still took several hours to do. The end result being that there are lights on the inside of the tree and not just wrapped entirely around in a cone. The only problem is that I then purchased a 250 pack, thinking that would have been enough to do the remaining part. I didn't want to have to remove all 250 lights, pack them back up, and return them since they were already wrapped around the tree, so I had to go buy another 100 pack. In retrospect, I should have just purchased the 400 pack, but I would definitely try and get a good sense of just how much string you're going to need. My 7' 5" tree has 950 lights, which are three strands. But this is entirely my fault so I am not blaming Twinkly. So overall, would I recommend this to someone to buy? If you're a huge lighting nerd or if you really want to show off and go full crazy on lights, if you have the cash, it might be worth it to you. Would I tell my parents to go spend $200 on a string of Christmas lights that they then have to set up, take a bunch of short videos on their phones, and then have to go through another round of setup to get the tree to do anything cool? I don't know if I would. Do they look really good when they are working? Absolutely, without a doubt, to me the purchase is worth it. From other reviews I expected the set up and the experience to be much worse than it has been, I have owned them for about a month and like I said, there has been nothing that I haven't worked out with a little troubleshooting. I just wish the app was a little more fleshed out.